Separated by 300 years, Dario Castello (1602–1631) and Luciano Berio (1925–2003) both pioneered new styles, transforming traditions, styles, and forms in their time. These two Italian trailblazers pushed fearlessly into the future while also looking back to the traditions that came before them.
Before dying tragically from the plague at the early age of 29, Dario Castello was integral to the creating a “new style” of the early Baroque, in the process transforming the Renaissance canzona into the sonata. His surviving 29 works feature an array of orchestration and are full of bold harmonies, sudden mood shifts, and dazzling virtuosity, all elements that became hallmarks of the stile moderno.
Luciano Berio, beginning with his Sequenzas (1958), reimagined performance, form, and sound in the 20th century. Always celebrating the music of others alongside his own innovations, he reinterpreted music from Purcell to The Beatles. A fun fact - he taught across the street at Juilliard from 1965-1971, founding Juilliard's first ensemble dedicated to performing work by living composers.
And though their work was pioneering in their own lifetimes, it still feels fresh today, even when it dips into tradition. We are so excited to share the music of these Italian time traveling futurists alongside artwork from those of the Italian perspective and futurist movements, as well as other forward thinking visual artists.
PROGRAM
DARIO CASTELLO
Sonate Concertate in stil moderno.
Libro secondo.
Sonata decima sesta a 4.
(1629)
Ambrogio Lorenzetti
Effects of Good Government in the City (1338–39)
Sienna, Italy
LUCIANO BERIO
Musica Leggera
(1974)
Giacomo Balla
Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912)
LUCIANO BERIO
Wasserklavier
from Six Encores
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(1965)
Giacomo Balla
Future (1923)
DARIO CASTELLO
Sonate Concertate in stil moderno.
Vol I.
Sonata II à 2
(1621)
Piero della Francesca
The Flagellation of Christ (1468-1470)
DARIO CASTELLO
Sonate Concertate in stil moderno.
Libro secondo.
Sonata decima sesta a 4.
(1629)
Hieronymus Bosch
Tondal’s Vision (1479)
LUCIANO BERIO
Divertimento
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(1946)
Giorgio de Chirico
The Soothsayer’s Recompense (1913)
LUCIANO BERIO
Sequenza I
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(1958)
Giorgio de Chirico
Ariana, The Silent Statue (1913)
DARIO CASTELLO
Sonate Concertate in stil moderno.
Libro secondo.
Sonata X à 3
​
(1629)
Hieronymus Bosch
The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490-1510)
LUCIANO BERIO
Quattro canzoni popolari
I. Dolce cominciamento
II. La donna ideale
III. Avendo gran disio
IV. Ballo
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(1946-1952)
Giorgio de Chirico
Piazza d'Italia (1913)
DARIO CASTELLO
Sonate Concertate in stil moderno.
Libro secondo.
Sonata IV à 4
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(1629)
Albert Robida
Leaving the Opera in the Year 2000 (1892)
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
MUSIC OF
DARIO CASTELLO (1602-1631)
& LUCIANO BERIO (1925-2003)
Matthew Aucoin, piano & percussion
Miranda Cuckson, violin & viola
Emi Ferguson, flute
Keir GoGwilt, violin
Coleman Itzkoff, cello
Dennis Hruska - Associate General Manager
Konrad Custer - Production Manager
Monifa Brown - Artist Services Manager
Eddy Perez - Guest Experience Manager
Amy Harting - Line Producer
LUCIANO BERIO
Luciano Berio’s biography begins like the story of many Italian (and German, and French…) composers of the past: his ancestors were all musicians ever since the 18th century. He was born in a small town, Oneglia, where his grandfather and his father played the organ in a local church and also composed. (Universal Edition has published some of their works in the volume Berio Family Album where Luciano’s pieces are printed along with Adolfo and Ernesto Berio’s).
While Ernesto Berio was an ardent admirer of the Duce, his son was an equally ardent antifascist – ardent and furious: he could not forgive Mussolini for falsifying music history by suppressing the works of the pioneering composers of the 20th century. Having grown up in the provinces, Berio was in any case handicapped by having been cut off from cultural life but Italian fascism aggravated his isolation by depriving him of access to music which would have been so essential for his development.
Berio was convinced of the need for young composers to come to terms with the achievements of their predecessors by studying their scores and writing music in various styles. He owed a great deal to his teacher Ghedini under whose influence he learned to love and respect the music of Monteverdi (in 1966, he was to make an arrangement of Il Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda); also to his friend Bruno Maderna (“I learned for instance from the way he conducted Mozart or my works and his own. He had a thorough knowledge of early counterpoint, Dufay and the others, and studied electronic music much earlier than I did).
Berio and Maderna founded together the Studio di Fonologia Musicale (1955) where Mutazioni, Perspectives and Thema (Omaggio a Joyce) as well as Différences were composed. They also established a journal, Incontri musicali (1956-1960) a title which they also gave to a concert series, with Boulez, Scherchen, Maderna among the conductors. (“We had many enemies. I remember on one occasion, when Boulez was conducting, it came to a scuffle so that the police had to intervene”).
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Next to Ghedini and Maderna, Berio also learned a great deal from Pousseur whom he had met in Darmstadt in 1954. “If I look back at those years – he was to say – I feel gratitude to three people: Ghedini, Maderna and Pousseur. After all, I was still the young man from Oneglia and I needed their help to understand many things about music”.
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Over the years and decades, Luciano Berio grew to become a towering figure in international musical life. Similarly to a handful of other composers, all born in the 1920’s (including Boulez and Nono), whatever he produced became a milestone in the history of music – whether works for solo instruments and solo voice (the Sequenza-series), pieces for chamber ensemble (including the Chemins based on some of the Sequenze), orchestra (Sinfonia – with eight voices added to the ensemble - is to this day a representative composition of the 1960’s),chorus and orchestra (Coro being an emblematic treatment of folk music within the framework of a contemporary composition), voice and orchestra (such as Epiphanies), solo voice, chorus and orchestra (Berio’s farewell to composition: Stanze for baritone, male chorus and orchestra) and all his music theatre pieces (Passaggio, La vera storia, Un re in ascolto, Laborintus II…).
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He never lost his awareness of and interest in his predecessors – hence his reconstruction of an unfinished Schubert symphony in Rendering, his arrangements and instrumentations of Purcell, Boccherini, de Falla, Verdi, Mahler, Puccini, Weill. Neither did he close his ears to music outside the sphere of the concert hall and theatre: he was an admirer of the Beatles and arranged some of their hits. He also orchestrated a bunch of folksongs under the eponymous title Folk Songs which has in its turn also become a hit.
Luciano Berio was conscious of his responsibilities as a member of society. He said he could not understand composers who deluded themselves to be a mouthpiece of the universe or mankind. As he put it: “In my view it is enough if we endeavour to become responsible children of society”.
DARIO CASTELLO
The name Castello was, and is still, common in Venice; indeed, there appears to have been a family of musicians who served the Doge and other Venetian employers in the first half of the seventeenth century and perhaps earlier. Payment and census records, contracts and necrologies from the period refer to three Castello instrumentalists who were almost certainly related: Bartolomeo, Giovanni Francesco and Giovanni Battista. The last of these was engaged as a member of the Doge’s six-strong team of piffari, or wind players, from 27 December 1624 to 15 November 1633, noted in the San Marco archives as son of ‘Dario of Venice, musician in our aforementioned chapel’.
Other biographical references to Dario Castello appear only in the title-pages and dedications of the composer’s two volumes of ‘Sonate concertate’, published in Venice respectively in 1621 and 1629. Several editions of Castello’s popular yet technically demanding and musically adventurous sonata anthologies were made, with Book I reprinted in Venice and Antwerp as late as 1658. Two editions of Book I describe the composer as ‘Capo di Compagnia de Musichi d’Instrumenti da fiato in Venetia’, leader of a Venetian company of piffari, while the Book II dedications announce that he was also a musician at San Marco. Eleanor Selfridge-Field’s painstaking archival detective work in the 1960s and early 1970s discovered no mention of a Dario Castello, musician or otherwise, resident in Venice between 1621 and 1658. Her attempts to reconstruct a ‘non-existent’ biography include the suggestion that the composer’s sonata volumes were published under an anagram of his real name, although there appears to be no suitable candidate to satisfy the efforts even of determined problem-solvers. (Selfridge-Field, Eleanor: ‘Dario Castello: A non-existent biography’. Music and Letters, 53 (1972), 179–190)
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from notes by Andrew Stewart © 1998
MATTHEW AUCOIN
Matthew Aucoin is an American composer, conductor, and writer, and a 2018 MacArthur Fellow. He is a co-founder of the pathbreaking American Modern Opera Company, and was the Los Angeles Opera’s Artist in Residence from 2016 to 2020.
As a composer, Aucoin is committed to expanding the possibilities of opera as a genre. His own operas, which include Eurydice and Crossing, have been produced at the Metropolitan Opera, the Los Angeles Opera, the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Boston Lyric Opera, the Lyric Opera of Chicago, and the Canadian Opera Company, among others. The Metropolitan Opera’s recording of Eurydice was nominated for a Grammy in 2023.
Aucoin’s most recent work of music-theater, Music for New Bodies, is a collaboration with the legendary director Peter Sellars, based on the poetry of Jorie Graham. The piece, co-commissioned by AMOC*, has so far been performed in Houston and at the Aspen Music Festival, and will travel to New York and Los Angeles in future seasons.
Aucoin’s orchestral and chamber music has been performed and recorded by such leading artists and ensembles as Yo-Yo Ma, the Philadelphia Orchestra, Zurich’s Tonhalle Orchestra, the BBC Scottish Symphony, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, the pianists Conor Hanick and Kirill Gerstein, and the Brentano Quartet. Last year, the MET Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featured Aucoin’s orchestral work Heath on its first European tour in several decades. Aucoin has also received commissions from Carnegie Hall, the Ojai Music Festival, the Aspen Music Festival, the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, Chicago’s Symphony Center, the Aspen Music Festival, and many other leading musical organizations.
His recent conducting engagements include appearances with the Los Angeles Opera, the Chicago Symphony, the Santa Fe Opera, the Houston Grand Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, the San Diego Symphony, Salzburg’s Mozarteum Orchestra, the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, the Rome Opera Orchestra, the Aspen Music Festival, Juilliard Opera, and other ensembles.
Aucoin’s book about opera, The Impossible Art: Adventures in Opera, was published in 2021 by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. He is a regular contributor to leading publications such as The New York Review of Books and The Atlantic.
MIRANDA CUCKSON
Called a “fearless, visionary and tremendously talented artist” (Sequenza21) and “a poetic soloist with a strong personality, yet unpretentious” (Die Presse, Vienna), Miranda Cuckson delights audiences with her performances of music ranging from older eras to the newest creations. An internationally acclaimed soloist and collaborator, violinist and violist, she enjoys performing at venues large and small, from concert halls to casual spaces. She has been a featured artist at the Berlin Philharmonie, Suntory Hall, Teatro Colón, Cleveland Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Performances, St. Paul Chamber Orchestra’s Liquid Music, 92nd St Y, National Sawdust, and the Ojai, Bard, Marlboro, Portland, Music Mountain, West Cork, Grafenegg, Wien Modern, Frequency, and LeGuessWho festivals. Miranda made her Carnegie Hall debut playing Piston’s Concerto No. 1 with the American Symphony Orchestra. She recently premiered Georg Friedrich Haas’ Violin Concerto No. 2 at the Vienna Musikverein and with four orchestras in Japan and Europe, and the Violin Concerto by Marcela Rodriguez with the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de México.
Miranda is a member of AMOC* and founder/director of non-profit Nunc. She has guest curated at National Sawdust and done programming for the Contempo series in Chicago and Miller Theater in New York, among others. Miranda’s many lauded albums include Világ featuring the Bartok Solo Sonata along with new works; a live recording of the Ligeti Violin Concerto; the Korngold and Ponce concertos; albums of music by American composers; Bartók, Schnittke and Lutoslawski on ECM; Melting the Darkness, microtonal and electroacoustic music; and Nono’s La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, which was named a Best Recording of the Year by the New York Times. She has a doctorate from the Juilliard School and she teaches at New School University.
EMI FERGUSON
A 2023 recipient of the Avery Fisher Career Grant, Emi Ferguson can be heard live in concerts and festivals with groups including AMOC*, Ruckus, the Handel and Haydn Society, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Manhattan Chamber Players, and as the music director of Camerata Pacifica Baroque. She is the founder of Exquisite Corpse, a collective dedicated to music that resists easy categorization.
Her recordings celebrate her fascination with reinvigorating music and instruments of the past for the present. Her debut album, Amour Cruel, an indie-pop song cycle inspired by the music of the 17th-century French court, spent four weeks on the classical, classical crossover, and world music Billboard charts. Her 2019 album Fly the Coop: Bach Sonatas and Preludes debuted at #1 on the iTunes classical charts and #2 on the Billboard classical charts, and was called “blindingly impressive ... a fizzing, daring display of personality and imagination” by The New York Times.
Beyond the concert stage and studio, Emi has appeared in nationally recognized events and media. She was a featured performer alongside Yo-Yo Ma, Paul Simon, and James Taylor at the 10th Anniversary Memorial Ceremony of 9/11 at Ground Zero, where her performance of Amazing Grace was televised worldwide. Her performance that day is now part of the permanent collection at the 911 Museum.
Emi has spoken and performed at several TEDx events and has been featured on media outlets including the Discovery Channel, Amazon Prime, WQXR, and Vox talking about how music relates to our world today. She developed the WQXR series This Composer Is SICK!, exploring the impact of Syphilis on historical composers, and is also a host for WQXR’s Young Artists Showcase and Once Upon A Composer. Her book Iconic Composers introduces music lovers of all ages to 50 incredible Western Classical composers from the past 1000 years.
Emi has taught on the faculties of The Juilliard School, the Bach Virtuosi Festival, and the University at Buffalo in addition to teaching masterclasses at universities around the country. Born in Japan and raised in London and Boston, she now resides in New York.
KEIR GOGWILT
Keir GoGwilt is a violinist, composer, and musicologist who was born in Edinburgh and grew up in New York City. His work combines historical research and collaborative experimentation across a range of musical styles and genres. He has soloed with groups including the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra, Chinese National Symphony, Orquesta Filarmonica de Santiago, and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project. This past season he created and performed a new stage role for “Marie & Pierre” by Bobbi Jene Smith and Celeste Oram with the Basel Ballet and Sinfonieorchester. He is collaborating with the JACK quartet, continuing his project “Zarabanda Variations” exploring histories and futures of the Latin Baroque, and continuing duo projects with Johnny Chang and Kyle Motl. He is also working on an upcoming record of dance tunes from the collections of 18th-century Scottish fiddler, Neil Gow, with Ruckus early music. GoGwilt earned his PhD in Music from UC San Diego in 2022 and was awarded the Chancellor’s Dissertation Medal. His scholarly articles on histories of performance and embodiment have been published in the Bach Journal, Current Musicology, and Naxos Musicology. As an undergraduate at Harvard he studied Literature, and was awarded the Louis Sudler Prize in the Arts.
COLEMAN ITZKOFF
Hailed by Alex Ross in The New Yorker for his "flawless technique and keen musicality," cellist Coleman Itzkoff thrives at the intersection of multiple musical worlds. A versatile soloist, chamber musician, and ensemble member, Coleman brings equal passion and mastery to the exploration of historical instruments and contemporary music, to curating chamber experiences and directing festivals, to premiering new works and arranging for orchestras.
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Since becoming a founding member of the American Modern Opera Company (AMOC) in 2017, Coleman's artistic practice has expanded in unexpected directions. Working closely with composers Doug Balliett, Keir GoGwilt, and Matthew Aucoin, he has premiered countless works and helped shape AMOC's vision of discipline-colliding art. In 2022, AMOC became only the third ensemble in 75 years to hold the Ojai Festival's Music Directorship. Coleman's work with AMOC has also led him to explore acting, dancing, and theatrical collaboration—performing in choreographer Bobbi Jene Smith's 'Lost Mountain' and 'Broken Theatre,' and collaborating with Or Schraiber on 'The Cello Player.'
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In recent years, Coleman has deepened his engagement with Baroque and Renaissance music on period instruments as a core member of Ruckus Early Music and Twelfth Night Ensemble. Chamber music has been central to his musical life since childhood, and he performs regularly at leading festivals including Marlboro, La Jolla SummerFest, and Yellowbarn, as well as at Carnegie Hall, London's Wigmore Hall, and venues throughout Europe and Australia.
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Throughout his career, Coleman has been committed to bringing music to broader audiences, receiving grants including the Sviatoslav Richter Grant for Music Outreach and the Cleveland Clinic Arts and Medicine Award.
