Gripping, crowd-pleasing memorial to Berio

I’m sure we all looked pretty silly at the first concert performance of Luciano Berio’s “Laborintus II,” which was given at Mills College, Oakland, in 1967. Hair was long, clothes were highly decorative. I owned a sport coat partially made out of a rug and probably wore it, maybe over a shirt fashioned out of an American flag.

And although my memory of that concert is surely flawed after all these years, I do know that there was no silliness on the Mills stage. This amazing score was serious, important, mind-expanding music, and it still is, as the Los Angeles New Music Group proved Tuesday night at a Green Umbrella concert dedicated to the composer, who died in 2003.

Too bad, though, about some of the silliness and theatrical triteness that crept into an otherwise gripping account conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen at Walt Disney Concert Hall.

Utilizing a text by the experimental Italian poet Edoardo Sanguineti, “Laborintus II” touches on several major themes that were Berio obsessions: memory, love, death, usury. Sanguineti conflates Dante in Italian and Pound and Eliot in English, along with original material, into a verbal stew that is as up to the minute as anything from the latest language poets.

Berio was a big personality, and there was an inherent sense of theater in nearly every bar he wrote. He assigns a speaker to declaim Sanguineti’s text but also dramatically inflates it in extravagant contributions from three female vocal soloists, a small chorus and a chamber orchestra that includes two drum sets and two harps, winds, brass, cellos and bass, as well as electronic music on tape.

Everyone, whether singer or instrumentalist, has the task of making sensual, incendiary poetry ever more sensual and incendiary. The singers’ role is to make the words explode off the page through arresting chirps and roars, whispers and moans. The composer here is both liberator and sonic libertine.

Salonen got ravishing, varied and outlandish sound from instrumentalists and singers. But the baritone William Stone, while sonorous, proved a bland reciter compared with Federico Sanguineti, who has made a small career out of his alternately terrifying and disarmingly tender performances of his father’s text. The three sassy vocal soloists -- Hila Plitmann, Elizabeth Keusch and Kelly O’Connor -- were a delight when they weren’t being obnoxiously sassy (Plitmann, in particular, playing for cheap laughs).

Still, “Laborintus II” made an impression; a large crowd was excitedly won over.

Berio’s piece was preceded by the U.S. premieres of Salonen’s small-scale wind quintet “Memoria” and British composer Colin Matthews’ large-scale “Continuum,” for mezzo soprano and chamber orchestra. “Memoria” memorializes Berio; “Continuum” has nothing to do with Berio but is impressive.

“Memoria” is derived from an early, aborted wind quintet that Salonen returned to 21 years later, in 2003. Its harmonies are rich, its sonorities dark and mellifluous. Understated, it has only a few moments of Salonen’s typical playfulness. The impetus, he has said, was to get his composing juices flowing before he undertook his large Philharmonic Disney Hall commission, “Wing on Wing.” The somber chorale at the end is for Berio.

“Continuum” sets two poems by the Italian poet Eugenio Montale -- “Crisalide” (Chrysalis) in the original Italian, “Casa sul Mare” (House by the Sea) in English translation -- along with two Rilke fragments in French. Janice Felty, the soloist, made mush of the obscure, opaque texts (which were projected in English as supertitles on a newly designed screen that finally fits in with the Disney decor), and she had trouble projecting over the ensemble. But her thick, fluid rendition was a curiously satisfying expression of Montale’s bleak poetic images and failed explanations, as well as of Rilke’s refusal to accept the ground underfoot as solid.

“Continuum” continues for nearly 45 minutes, and a listener must get past its sensation of restraint, of passion pushed under the rug. This is music settled on the surface, but underneath, it percolates likes crazy.

Another hearing is needed -- and wanted, especially now that I know how downright ravishing the ending is.

Needed, too, is a look at the text. The Philharmonic chose not to publish any texts Tuesday. Sanguineti is always a treat on the page, and “Laborintus II” is hard to find (it is not included with either commercial recording of Berio’s piece). Montale requires contemplation.

If printing texts is too much trouble, the orchestra could at least post them it on its website. A lot of meaningful effort went into this concert; a tiny bit more would have made the results more meaningful.