"Abstract motifs dream of a figurative bed on which to consummate their loves: do you think a pattern of concentric circles drawn with a compass cannot be gripped by frenzied, amorous longing for a freehand spiral?"—Italo Calvino

A good part of Berio's aesthetic is, for lack of a better phrase, "staunchly modernist": he's unapologetically committed to the principles of creative integrity and solid construction, as well as to certain pillar-precepts of artistic modernism, like "the tendency of the material," "autonomy," and "deep unity." But at the same time, he has an equally unflagging impulse to "look around his own corner"—to open up the instinct for closure and concealment, and invite in the unruly, anarchic, chaotic world of culture, history, and representation. If Berio's modernism is circle drawn with a compass, his post-modernism—an ecstatically free-handed spiral—ever keeps it in check.

In works such as his element pieces for piano (Air Piano, Fire Piano, Earth Piano, Water Piano), Berio manages to construct short, completely self-contained compositions which pursue a single expressive tone, isolated set of gestures, restricted harmonic palette, and a solitary formal principle—each a mini-modernist, compass-drafted utopia of sovereign composition. But in each work, he also plays a much looser game of evocations, almost looking back to the nineteenth-century character pieces of Schumann or the Baroque harpsichord ordres of François Couperin. Berio's brief Luftklavier is perhaps the most whimsical of the quartet: it is a fastidious construction, tightly organized around a nexus of pitches that run the gamut between solid chords and broken melodies, woven together by an uninterrupted, coursing ostinato. At the same time, it marvellously evokes the wafting delicacy and precariousness of the air in its title; the texture of work floats by, turning with fine-tuned transience into demi-objects, and just as rapidly dissolving back into an unrelieved flow. Perhaps Berio's most sophisticated gift resides in treading the line of abstract music and programmatic music, compass in hand; Luftklavier flirts with both sides but commits to neither—it's too impressionistic to be abstruse, but it also isn't "air." If anything, its logic is best-served by actual elaboration, as Berio would give the piece three years later in his massive Concerto II (reworking the earlier Points on the Curve to Find...).

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