"Ritorno is above all an homage to a dream betrayed by history, by men, by Stalinism.—Can betrayal be translated into a musical level?—I think not...The material plays a musical role above all."—Berio

It's clear from Berio's major works—Sinfonia, Coro, La Vera Storia—that he's a "political" composer. For every musical or formal network in his scores, there also seems to exist a window to the outside, where the music overflows into territory whose expressive intensity cannot be contained. Il Ritorno degli Snovidenia (The Return of the Dreams) is one of Berio's most ecstatically lyrical creations, an 18-minute "concerto" for cello and ensemble; it's also one of his most expressively hermetic designs and most potent historical fables.

What makes Ritorno particularly arresting is its position as a kind of fulcrum in Berio's work, wedged between the problems of "pure" and "political" music, integrity and allegory. It seems to pose, and try to solve, one of Berio's most persistent musical questions: how does melody relate to harmony? Simultaneously a civic riddle hovers over its head, related to the ideals of communism: how does the individual relate to the community?

The solution is an extension of a technique Berio had developed since his first Sequenza for flute (1958), where he tried to create out of an ever-permuting single musical line a "virtual polyphony." In Ritorno, this reaches tremendous sophistication: the solo cello's opening soliloquy, already revolving around its own tones and articulations, gradually sends out subtle signals; first a harp, then a muted trumpet receive, rebound, and reconfigure the material. Soon the other instruments have begun to create a whole network of lines, so much so that by the middle of the piece, the cello has engendered and is thoroughly enmeshed in a whole web of gesture and harmony.

At the same time, however, resonance acquires the expressive edge of entanglement, growth into overgrowth, the hint of immanent monstrosity. What is at once a self-generating organism, the at-work celebration of unity-in-diversity, also becomes a parable of overextension, disorientation, the promise of deception behind mimicry. In its wan colors and chill hush, the ensemble's musical community equivocates between the process of freedom and the impossible situation of making a labyrinth as you walk through it. It's a bizarre twist on that existentialist paradigm, the myth of Sisyphus, and carries with it Berio's bitter skepticism of all ideologies.

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