Time and again, through the second half of the twentieth century, Luciano Berio showed how fully he understood music's intimacy with gesture, memory, language and voice. Among the works considered below, his opera Un re in ascolto (‘A King Listening’) takes place in a theatre, where Shakespeare's Tempest is at once being rehearsed and undergoing disintegration. His Sinfonia, for orchestra with voices, is one of the period's classics, not least for its middle movement, in which the scherzo of Mahler's ‘Resurrection’ Symphony sparks off quotations from throughout the western repertory since Bach. He also gave the age its hallmark studies in solo virtuosity, of which that for cello (Sequenza XIV), was one of his last compositions.

Un re in ascolto

It is like looking at the disturbed surface of a pool: if you try to make out what is reflected, you may miss the pattern of the ripples. The important question concerning Berio's opera Un re in ascolto is not what it is about, but rather how it goes about the business of being about anything. For the director, this is a marvellous liberation, since there is very little action or motivation that needs making plain. But the impalpability of the piece also presents a challenge, a challenge not to use ambiguity as an excuse for recklessness; and the first thing to be said of the Covent Garden production is that Graham Vick directs a wonderful show that is also intimately responsible to the work.