musica viva vol. 50 – Berio / Žuraj

From the outset, Sir Simon Rattle’s conducting career has been marked by a spirit of innovation and renewal – and contemporary music in all its facets continues to play a significant role in his work. So it was only natural that, upon taking up his post as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Chorus and Symphony Orchestra, he should dedicate a concert to musica viva. The programme featured the world premiere of Vito Žuraj's Automatones as well as Luciano Berio's Coro. Sir Simon Rattle has conducted the latter piece several times before, but this performance marks the first recording under his baton. This is due to the unique demands that the composition places on recording technology: choir singers and orchestra musicians are positioned in pairs on the podium to overcome the visual and acoustic separation of choir and orchestra voices. This presented a particular challenge to the Bavarian Radio recording team, but they rose to it successfully, as can be heard on the new CD from BR-KLASSIK.

Composed between 1975 and 1976, Luciano Berio's Coro, for forty voices and orchestra, takes anonymous folk poems by the Sioux, the Navajo and the Zuni, as well as song texts from Polynesia, Peru, Croatia, Venice, Piedmont, Chile, and the Song of Solomon – all of them reflecting the deeply human urge for freedom – and combines them with the moving poetry of Pablo Neruda, whose death coincided with the bloody suppression of the Allende democracy in Chile by Augusto Pinochet in September 1973. As Berio stated: “I was not thinking of nations, but of the encounter between people, each with their own stories, their passions and their destroyed homelands.” The result is a brilliantly composed, committed work in a “tragic mood” (Berio), which remains highly relevant today. Commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, it was premiered on October 24, 1976 at the Donaueschingen Music Festival by the WDR Radio Choir and the WDR Radio Orchestra Cologne, conducted by the composer.

The programme for the live-recorded musica viva concert on October 13, 2023 from the Isarphilharmonie in Gasteig HP8 also included the world premiere of Automatones for large orchestra. This new piece by the Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj (*1979) was commissioned by musica viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk. Created in 2022/23, the orchestral work deals with the mythological Automatones – metal statues of animals, humans and monsters created by the divine blacksmith Hephaestus and the Athenian craftsman Daedalus. When Heracles visited the workshop, he smashed one of the statues, mistaking it for a real person attacking him. For the composer, the Automatones represent “a primordial form of artificial intelligence, a theme that is currently shaping the world more than ever before. This inspired me to conduct sound research into illusions of seemingly infinite ascending tone sequences or rhythmic accelerations, as well as the use of different types of motor skill in general.” (Žuraj)