events

The third edition of the Luciano Berio Festival, organized by the Centro Studi Luciano Berio with the patronage and contribution of the Municipality of Radicondoli, will be held in Radicondoli (province of Siena) from May 24 to the 26.
The key word of this year's Festival, Traversata (crossing), is the title of one of the most intense theoretical texts of Berio's maturity. Interpreted in different metaphorical and concrete terms, it has been taken as a symbol of the passage toward 2025, the centenary of the Berio's birth.
The Festival will feature various performances, public events, an exhibition, seminars, and readings-concerts in different venues within and outside the Tuscan village.
The Traversata is part of an international project dedicated to Berio's Sequenze that was launched in 2023 by the Centro Studi Luciano Berio in partnership with the Amici della Musica of Florence in a series of workshops in Radicondoli, Darmstadt and Cagliari. The 2024 Festival will follow suit with three exceptional musicians: the internationally acclaimed guitarist Eliot Fisk and accordionist Teodoro Anzellotti - dedicatees of Berio’s Sequenza XI and Sequenza XIII, and violinist Francesco D'Orazio, an outstanding interpreter of Sequenza VIII. They will be joined in the Festival's opening event (in the village’s main piazza) by the Filarmonica Rossini of Florence, conducted by Giampaolo Lazzeri.

As part of the 2023 edition of the Darmstädter Ferienkurse (Darmstadt Summer Course), a workshop was held on Berio’s Sequenzas I, II and XIV, featuring Angela Ida De Benedictis, Claire Chase, Lucas Fels and Gunnhildur Einarsdóttir, with the collaboration of Giovanni Cestino.

During the workshop, each of the three Sequenzas were discussed in depth, combining performance practice with the direct analysis of archival sources. The workshop was an occasion for reconsidering the relationship between performance practice and musicological research, as complementary and “applied” disciplines interacting with each other. In this sense, the corpus of Berio’s Sequenzas offers a perfect “working environment” for testing the longstanding issue of integration between theory and practice.

The workshop was opened on August 12, with a Performance-Lecture on Gesti for solo recorder (1966) (click here). This piece—a sort of “extra” in the Sequenzas cycle—was analyzed as a methodological case study to unpack some of the recurring issues the genesis, performance practice and publishing history of Berio’s solo compositions. After that, the focus was on Sequenza I for flute (August 12), Sequenza II for harp (August 13), and Sequenza XIV for cello (August 14). A final discussion followed on August 15.

Dialogue: declined in the plural, this is the key word of a three-day music festival where different realities and attitudes of making and thinking music, even apparently far apart, are placed in continuous dialogue.
The first of the dialogues is that between a town, Radicondoli (where Luciano Berio chose to dwell from the first half of the 1970s), its inhabitants and various sound constellations inspired by Berio’s music and thought.
The dialogues thus involve places, attitudes, and practices of a 'making music together', based on the convergence of opposites. The sound dialogues are played out between inside and outside, between the square and the concert hall, between professional and amateur musicians, between art and popular music, between the music of today and that of the past, between a public and a private dimension, between generations and different perceptions...

For the Festival’s brochure click here
For the programme in English click here

Between May and November 2023, numerous events are scheduled to remember Luciano Berio on the 20th anniversary of his death.
On Thursday 4 May, at the Teatro Studio Borgna of the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, a concert dedicated to Berio was held as part of the PMCE (Parco della Musica Contemporanea Ensemble) concert series. Ljuba Bergamelli (voice), Luca Sanzò (viola) and Paolo Ravaglia (contrabass clarinet), together with the PMCE musicians, performed Chamber Music, Différences, Chemins II, Sequenza III, Sequenza IX, O King and Circles.
On Tuesday 23 May, at the Teatro Verdi in Florence, the ORT-Orchestra della Toscana performed Rendering under the baton of Andrea Battistoni.
From 26 to 28 May, Dialoghi: Festival Luciano Berio 2023 was held in Radicondoli (SI), organised by the Centro Studi Luciano Berio in collaboration with the Municipality of Radicondoli.
On 2 June, as part of the Late Spring Music Festival at the Reggia di Venaria (Turin), curated by Claudio Pasceri, violinist Irvine Arditti performed Berio's Sequenza VIII.
On 7 and 8 June, Laborintus II is scheduled as part of the Manifeste 2023 festival at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, with Serge Maggiani as narrator, the singers and musicians of the Ars Nova ensemble and the electronic part curated by Ircam.

From the 27th to the 29th of May, 2022, Radicondoli (Province of Siena, Italy) hosted a weekend dedicated to Luciano Berio and his profound bond with the Tuscan village he chose in the 1970s as his favourite place of the heart, in which to work and spend time with his family and closest friends.
The event, entitled “Suoni e occasioni: Radicondoli ricorda Luciano Berio" (Sounds and occasions: Radicondoli remembers Luciano Berio), is organised by Radicondoli Arte in collaboration with the Centro Studi Luciano Berio and the Radiconvento Music School (Dulcimer Fondation pour la musique). The program aims to celebrate the Maestro (as he is still called by the residents of the village), through the sharing of memories and testimonies of the people who knew him and were part of his life.
The weekend consisted of audiovisual projections, an exhibition of archival material, meetings with the public, musical performances and a concert by the mdi ensemble with works by Berio and readings of his texts. The throughline of all these events was the concept of "occasion," as defined with multiple meanings and retraced through the artistic and personal biography of Luciano Berio.

To underline the relationship between Berio and Radicondoli, we have collected extracts from texts and interviews where the composer talks about this special affection on this page.

Some photos of the meeting with the public, held on 28 May at the Teatro dei Risorti in Radicondoli, are collected here.

Bruno Maderna © Gisela Bauknecht [Sammlung Bruno Maderna, Paul Sacher Stiftung Basel]

On the centenary of his birth, Centro Studi Luciano Berio wants to pay homage to Bruno Maderna through a small collection of archival documents, partly unpublished, which convey the intensity of a unique human and artistic friendship. Juxtaposed like pieces of a colorful mosaic, images, words and music indicate unequivocally – and at times moving – the strength of a friendship made of giving and receiving, and of affection, enthusiasm, desire for knowledge and also of disenchanted pragmatism. But, above all, of a common way of feeling and experiencing music in an all-encompassing way, as «an enchanted landscape, a document of all of us men of the past, of the present, of the future».

For our homage to Bruno Maderna, click here.

The elegant box featuring the nine Chemins by Luciano Berio was released by Sebastian Solte's label Bastille Musique. Composed between 1965 and 1996 as a sort of "citation, translation, expansion and transcription of the Sequenzas for solo instrument" – to paraphrase the words of the composer – these Chemins are also the best analyzes of the Sequenzas.
The double CD, accompanied by the program notes and a beautiful iconographic set, includes the live recording of the six concerts featuring the WDR Symphony Orchestra which were held between 2016 and 2017 in Cologne, in the frame of the cycle "Musik der Zeit": seven conductors and seven soloists participated in this ambitious project, which includes the world premiere recording of Chemins IIc.
For the disc review, read here.