At a time when fusions of modernism and vernacular musical material are quite common, it may be hard to appreciate just how radical Luciano Berio works like Folk Songs, Beatles Songs, and Cries of London were in the 1960s, when they first appeared, and when the slightest concession to popular taste was greeted with the angry sneers of high modernists. These works are sometimes called folk song transcriptions, but that's not quite what they are. The interview-format booklet notes of this release by the fine chamber vocal ...
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At a time when fusions of modernism and vernacular musical material are quite common, it may be hard to appreciate just how radical Luciano Berio works like Folk Songs, Beatles Songs, and Cries of London were in the 1960s, when they first appeared, and when the slightest concession to popular taste was greeted with the angry sneers of high modernists. These works are sometimes called folk song transcriptions, but that's not quite what they are. The interview-format booklet notes of this release by the fine chamber vocal group Les Cris de Paris (especially appropriate for Berio's Cries of London) are compiled from earlier interviews with Berio and give considerable insight; Berio thought of such pieces as a way to build bridges between genres. What strikes the contemporary listener is that the ideas Berio advances in these works have not yet been fully explored. He says, for example, that "[t]he instrumental discourse has a very precise function: to suggest and comment on what I perceived as the...
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