Album: Luciano Berio, Sequenzas III & IV; Différences; Due Pezzi; Chamber Music (Newton Classics)

Recorded in 1969 with the Juilliard Ensemble, which he founded while teaching there, these chamber works illustrate Berio's postwar development.

There's something comfortingly modernist about the early-50s piano and violin duets of Due Pezzi and the settings of James Joyce poems that comprise Chamber Music, which find his wife, Cathy Berberian, in restrained mood. But it is Différences, composed for five instruments playing alongside tape treatments of themselves, that most impresses here: always lively and inquisitive, the breezy interplay of wind, harp and strings flourishing while never baulking at the more astringent discordancies.

DOWNLOAD THIS Différences; Sequenza III