Born from the tragedies of 1968, Berio’s miraculous ‘Sinfonia’ still resonates

Everyone is asking, or predicting, “what’s next.” That’s what you do in a pandemic. When now?” And Luciano Berio, applying Mahler’s symphony and Beckett’s novel as framework in his “Sinfonia,” took “What next?” to the next step. Berio took the second movement of Mahler’s Second Symphony, known as the “Resurrection,” and added musical commentaries in the form of snippets of well-known pieces, spoken text, scat by the Swingles and much else. Berio has an answer with his own text: “We shall overcome the incessant noise, for as Henri says, if the noise would stop there’d be nothing more to say.” The movement concludes, “We must collect our thoughts, for the unexpected is always upon us, in our rooms, in the street, at the door, on the stage.” By this point, “we shall overcome” becomes a startling allusion to the murder of King, which is the unexpected core of “Sinfonia.” Berio spent most of the 1960s in America — the first half of the decade in the Bay Area, the second half on the East Coast teaching at the Juilliard School and at Harvard. Starting points Luciano Berio made the first recording of “Sinfonia” with the Swingles and the New York Philharmonic directly after the premiere, and it vibrates with the animation of something being born.