Luciano Berio

CAMBRIDGE - On Friday, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard presented conductor Jeffrey Milarsky's crack new-music ensemble, the Manhattan Sinfonietta - once the Columbia Sinfonietta, the now-independent group remains Columbia University's contemporary ensemble-in-residence. The concert, the first of two collectively called "The New Soloist," showed that, while the vocabulary may change (here, a profusely detailed non-tonal modernism), the new soloist is a lot like the old - speed, dexterity, and dramatic flair are still the touchstones of individual musical glory.

CAMBRIDGE - On Friday, the Fromm Music Foundation at Harvard presented conductor Jeffrey Milarsky's crack new-music ensemble, the Manhattan Sinfonietta - once the Columbia Sinfonietta, the now-independent group remains Columbia University's contemporary ensemble-in-residence. The concert, the first of two collectively called "The New Soloist," showed that, while the vocabulary may change (here, a profusely detailed non-tonal modernism), the new soloist is a lot like the old - speed, dexterity, and dramatic flair are still the touchstones of individual musical glory.

New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, affectionately pronounced "Sick Puppy") is back, bringing seminars, master classes, and a week's worth of free evening concerts dedicated to the proposition that the avant-garde is its own invigorating reward. Institute artistic director Stephen Drury opened Monday night's concert with Luciano Berio's 1965 piano solo "Sequenza IV. " Like others in this celebrated series of studies, the piece finds drama in the instrument's inherent contradictions: crisp attack versus sustained decay, notes washed...

CAMBRIDGE - Luciano Berio stands apart from other composers of the postwar European avant-garde for the vividly theatrical character that infuses his music. At a time when other composers were making personality secondary to process, Berio was delivering his experiments with a sly nod and wink. Collage New Music is devoting its season to Berio, and its first concert was devoted mostly to keyboard works, which were in the very capable hands of pianists Christopher Oldfather and Donald Berman.

CAMBRIDGE -- Collage New Music's program Sunday night was mostly a tribute to old masters of new music -- Pierre Boulez, Bernard Rands, and the late Luciano Berio and Donald Sur. But it was amiably introduced by Matthew Van Brink (born 1978), a graduate student at Boston University, and Collage's first-ever composer-in-residence. Not much music can hold its own against Boulez's epochal "Le marteau sans maitre" ("The Hammer Without a Master"), which he began in 1953, when he was only a couple of years older than Van Brink is now. Collage music director David Hoose wisely chose to introduce it...

CAMBRIDGE - Luciano Berio stands apart from other composers of the postwar European avant-garde for the vividly theatrical character that infuses his music. At a time when other composers were making personality secondary to process, Berio was delivering his experiments with a sly nod and wink. Collage New Music is devoting its season to Berio, and its first concert was devoted mostly to keyboard works, which were in the very capable hands of pianists Christopher Oldfather and Donald Berman.

LENOX -- When Osvaldo Golijov bounded onstage at Tanglewood after the world-premiere performance of his "Azul," the audience -- 8 , 692 people -- greeted the composer like a rock star. Golijov's music has instant appeal, a glowing surface of sound that recalls the work of one of his mentors, the late Luciano Berio . In some quarters that makes him suspect, but it shouldn't, because his music is at least as elusive as it is accessible. He's a serious composer and "Azul" is a serious work, appealing on first hearing, but also puzzling.

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project called its program of five "unexpected concertos" at Jordan Hall Friday "Strange Bedfellows. " None (well, almost none) of the music induced slumber, however. Created for an odd array of solo instruments (viola, electric guitar, theremin, mandolin, French horn) accompanied by instrumental ensembles of various size and composition, the works prodded at the frontiers of traditional concerto form. Electronic and acoustic sounds engaged in conversation - sometimes in rancorous argument - across the centuries, forcing us to...

The New England String Ensemble’s Saturday concert had a simple, and effective, structure. In the middle were two 20th-century pieces, vastly different in their languages; bookending them were fugues by Mozart and Beethoven, works that came out of their composers’ late-in-life fascination with Baroque counterpoint. The intertwining of tradition and modernity made for a program that hung together exceptionally well. Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue in C minor had a warm, rounded sound, though it lacked some needed rhythmic energy.

CAMBRIDGE - In the fourth of the "Folk Songs" Luciano Berio arranged in 1964, a lover petitions a nightingale. "Apprends-moi ton langage," he implores, "teach me your language. " On Monday, one could hear Berio asking the same of music itself. The concluding concert of Collage New Music's shortened, all-Berio season focused on works of the '50s and '60s, when the late Italian composer both honed his avant-garde expertise and began to stake his claim to the unexpected directions where his music subsequently would go. Much of Berio's work was finding a new vernacular of...

New England Conservatory's Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP, affectionately pronounced "Sick Puppy") is back, bringing seminars, master classes, and a week's worth of free evening concerts dedicated to the proposition that the avant-garde is its own invigorating reward. Institute artistic director Stephen Drury opened Monday night's concert with Luciano Berio's 1965 piano solo "Sequenza IV. " Like others in this celebrated series of studies, the piece finds drama in the instrument's inherent contradictions: crisp attack versus sustained decay, notes washed...

LENOX -- When Osvaldo Golijov bounded onstage at Tanglewood after the world-premiere performance of his "Azul," the audience -- 8 , 692 people -- greeted the composer like a rock star. Golijov's music has instant appeal, a glowing surface of sound that recalls the work of one of his mentors, the late Luciano Berio . In some quarters that makes him suspect, but it shouldn't, because his music is at least as elusive as it is accessible. He's a serious composer and "Azul" is a serious work, appealing on first hearing, but also puzzling.

CAMBRIDGE -- Collage New Music's program Sunday night was mostly a tribute to old masters of new music -- Pierre Boulez, Bernard Rands, and the late Luciano Berio and Donald Sur. But it was amiably introduced by Matthew Van Brink (born 1978), a graduate student at Boston University, and Collage's first-ever composer-in-residence. Not much music can hold its own against Boulez's epochal "Le marteau sans maitre" ("The Hammer Without a Master"), which he began in 1953, when he was only a couple of years older than Van Brink is now. Collage music director David Hoose...

Two of New England Conservatory's superstar faculty soloists teamed up Tuesday night for a joint recital: guitarist Eliot Fisk and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman. Jordan Hall was a sauna, but the large, young audience listened with attention and responded with whoops, whistles, and cheers of enthusiasm. Each played a major 20th-century solo work written for him. Fisk chose Luciano Berio's "Sequenza" for guitar (1988), the eleventh in the composer's magisterial series of works for solo instruments.

For all the intelligence and adventurism of its musical offerings, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum has never had a proper venue in which to present them. A large number of outstanding musicians - including many young artists who would later become stars - have played in the low-ceilinged Tapestry Room, visually sumptuous but acoustically flat. With the unveiling this week of the museum's new Renzo Piano-designed wing, that era is over. A gala concert last night offered a group of donors, trustees, and other VIPs a first look at, and a first listen to, Calderwood Hall, the elegant...