Musikfest 3: Appropriations

Luciano Berio, who would have been 100 this year, has been one of the featured composers at this year’s Musikfest Berlin, and audiences have already had the chance to hear experience such works as Requies, his brief elegy for Cathy Berberian, and Rendering, his reimagined version of Schubert’s incomplete tenth symphony. However, the festival’s most ambitious Berio programme came courtesy of the Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, who paired Debussy’s La Mer with two of Berio’s most important scores from the 1960s: the enchanting suite of Folk Songs, and the Sinfonia, one of his indisputable masterpieces. With exciting performances from the orchestra under the direction of Daniel Harding, and the versatile vocals of Magdalena Kožená, the evening was charming and invigorating in equal measure.

Theft has been a reasonably…