Sinfonia (Berio)

Sinfonia (Symphony) is a composition by the Italian composer Luciano Berio which was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary. Composed in 1968–69 for orchestra and eight amplified voices, it is a musically innovative post-serial classical work, with multiple vocalists commenting about musical (and other) topics as the piece twists and turns through a seemingly neurotic journey of quotations and dissonant passages. The eight voices are not used in a traditional classical way; they frequently do not sing at all, but speak, whisper and shout words by Claude Lévi-Strauss, whose Le cru et le cuit provides much of the text, excerpts from Samuel Beckett's novel The Unnamable, instructions from the scores of Gustav Mahler and other writings.

Leonard Bernstein states in the text version of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures from 1973 that Sinfonia was representative of the new direction classical music was taking after the pessimistic decade of the sixties (Bernstein 1976, p. 423).

Originally commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for its 125th anniversary, Sinfonia was premiered on October 10, 1968 by the orchestra and The Swingle Singers, with Berio conducting. At the time the work was still in four movements. In the months after the premiere Berio added a fifth movement, which was first played when Sinfonia was performed during the 1969 Donaueschingen Festival by the Southwest German Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ernest Bour. The New York Philharmonic first played the five movement version of Sinfonia on October 8, 1970, conducted by Leonard Bernstein—to whom the work is dedicated.

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