The solo piano piece Leaf, much like its companion Brin from roughly the same time, is a "study" on a single chord; also like Brin it is written in memory of a recently deceased friend of Berio's, in this case Michael Vyner of the London Sinfonietta. In regard to its construction, Leaf is like much of Berio's solo piano music: the composer, faced with the instrument he once thought of playing professionally (until a war injury), seems to jettison musical linearity, and instead makes the instrument into a kind of sound-mobile; notes and chords coalesce into perpetually reconfigured modules and nodes of activity, as if revealing a total shape only in slowly revolutions of perspective.

In the case of such a slender, intimate work as Leaf, one spies an erotic tendency inherent in all Berio's scores for solo instruments—not "sexual"-erotic, but "love"-erotic: a love of the sheer sensual aspect of the instrument's playing. The work's intense self-limiting with regard to its material seems to render that material perfunctory, or at least to shift in into the background like a compositional bedrock; meanwhile, the actual material of the piece, its creative "substance," becomes that meticulous, virtuosic panoply of performance directions which Berio punctiliously pens. The density, color, and attack of every chord is varied and savored in that variance; sound is indexed in finest partitions of the fingertip.

The last two notes of the piece hang in the air as if upbeats to another chord could not to be played; the major sixth they articulate, following a tritone, seems to allude to a moment near the beginning of Berio's towering masterwork from 1976, Coro. There, the piano's intonation introduces a solo soprano's melancholy declamation of a folk song: "Today is mine...." Perhaps not an intentional reference, it's also out of range of Berio's allusive sensibility, and serves a fitting subtextual farewell to friend passed away.

© All Music Guide