Luciano Berio - O king

O King (for mezzosoprano and five instruments) was originally composed in 1968 as a tribute to the recently assassinated Martin Luther King Jr.
The text is essentially made of the letters of the martyr's name and the words and their parts follow a musical analysis that is part of the general structure.
The voice firstly pronounces only some phonetic elements of the name, which is gradually composed and completed in the final bars.
This piece was lately included in one of his biggest works: Sinfonia (1968-69), where the second movement is an arrangement of this piece for orchestra and 8 voices.

Berio was born in 1925 in Oneglia (Italy). Both his father and grandfather were accomplished musicians, and Berio was initially trained by the latter as a youngster. He studied composition at the Milan Conservatory (Carlo Maria Giulini was one of his teachers) and, from the early '50s, began traveling to New York City often, where he came to know the Italian composer Luigi Dallapiccola, and was influenced by Dallapiccola's atonal style. During this decade, Berio became deeply involved in European avant–garde music. After 1955, he ran a Milan studio for electronic music with Italian composer Bruno Maderna, whom he knew through summers spent at an academy for modernist composers and musicians in Darmstadt, West Germany. At Darmstadt he also came to know Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and other leading names in European music, and Stockhausen's daring electronica compositions were particularly influential on the direction of Berio's work.
Berio spent a much of the 1960s living and working as teacher, conductor and composer in the United States. Over the years he increasingly drew from the pantheon of musical forms of the past, including Giuseppe Verdi's operas, the early modernist works from Igor Stravinsky, and even Gustav Mahler's romantic symphonies. He continued to find inspiration in literary works as well, and his Sinfonia for orchestra and vocal octet incorporated Mahler's "'Resurrection" Symphony as well as the words of dramatist Samuel Beckett.
After 1972, he lived and worked primarily in Italy. His sole excursion was a few years in the 1970s spent running Boulez's computer–music institute in Paris, France, but in 1980 Berio established his own electronic studio in Florence, which he named Tempo Reale.
After 2000 Berio served as president of the National Academy of St. Cecilia, a venerable Roman institution that includes an orchestra, library, school, and array of other musical organizations. He was also a frequent guest conductor with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for a number of years, and was working on an orchestration for a Monteverdi opera commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera artistic director Placido Domingo just before his death in 2003. The famed tenor sometimes teased the avant–gardist about his style. "'Luciano,'" Domingo recalled in the Los Angeles Times article, "'write for me some melodic music that I can sing,' I would say to him. And he would reply, 'Placido, everything I write sounds melodic to me.'"
Berio died on May 27, 2003


Performer: Ensamble Avantgarde

Original audio:    • Berio, O King