Reworking takes many different forms with Berio. The simplest kind is to be heard here in the maddeningly repetitive but gloriously witty fusing together of Boccherini’s four versions of his successful pot-boiler, Ritirata notturna di Madrid. On a much grander scale comes Rendering, which works around Berio’s orchestration of the sketches for Schubert’s Tenth Symphony. At 35 minutes this is a big piece, and I was initially reluctant to welcome a second recording so soon after Christoph Eschenbach’s for Koch International. Nevertheless, the composer’s own reading is phrased throughout with special sensitivity, and relishes the gentle and strange discontinuities between Schubert and Berio with absorbing delicacy.
Berio is at his best, and most distinctive, when the composer he reworks is Luciano Berio. Concerto II, “Echoing Curves”, from 1988-9, is a rich, complex elaboration of a work for piano and ensemble called Points on the curve to find … from 1974. More Boulezian than much Berio in its slow-moving tissue of clusters, trills and tremolandos, its shimmering textures conjure up a remarkable blend of density and luminosity, and the music is perfectly shaped to prepare a finely graded ‘dying fall’.
Good though it is to have a recording of Concerto II at last, I’d have been even happier if it had been coupled with other self-reworkings, from the Chemins series, in which some of Berio’s most personal and memorable music is to be found. The present performances have absolute authorial conviction, and the ‘big hall’ sound is plushy without excessive resonance.'