Nothing in Luciano Berio's musical universe has one interpretation; everything wavers, pearly and polyvalent, between levels of meaning. No sign points; all radiate, or spray, or plunge and disperse roots into their own semiotic sediment. The mind and ear always have to negotiate through a labyrinth, of lines, chords, articulations, forms, and histories. But what often makes his music irresistible is its ability to suggest density while delivering transparency. You easily hear the convolutions in a work like Coro, with its 40 voices and 40 instruments seamlessly interwoven; but in a two-minute work like the solo piano piece Brin, you marvel at how something so lucid and immaculate in sound could generate such a rich undergrowth of allusion and gesture.

To a certain extent, Berio simply has a gift for aphorism, at least in his briefer works; they tend to give off the intangible air of being a fulcrum, a node for forces and feeling much larger than they themselves. But in the case of Brin, which means "wisp" in French, the work's construction is complemented by an intertextual connection which magnifies its scope. The piece is constructed, like many moments in Berio's music, on a narrow nexus of pitches—essentially a single, richly chromatic chord. Berio generates much of the work's "material," however, by varying the way in which the chord is sounded: only at the very end is it played as a single unit; until that point it is broken into all sorts of smaller groups, arpeggiated, turned into melodic fragments, filtered and colored by pedal. The piece thus works less like progression than a mobile, turning slowly in suspension to reveal all its sides.

Though this is in many ways a technique for dealing with pitches first seen in Schoenberg's serial piano pieces, it has a very different air in Berio's hands; whereas the older composer appeared to conceive the material in a more abstract, autonomous fashion, Berio seems to think of his tones as the mediating means for a kind of informal, intimate contact with the piano itself. In this regard "toccata"—"touched"—is the perfect term: Brin, like much of Berio's other piano music, is bound up in the sensuous aspect of playing the piano. Only around that affective bedrock does the work's "expression" arise, as a kind of sentimental reflection from afar.

That sentimental reflection has roots, however: Brin was written as a memorial for a friend of Berio's, the young pianist Michel Ouder, who died tragically at the age of 20. And in characteristic fashion, Berio enmeshes a moving subtext: the piece's chord, once disclosed in full at the end, is a variant on chord employed in the fourth of Schoenberg's Op. 19 Six Little Piano Pieces—a work which was also a memorial (for Gustav Mahler), and whose repetitions were said to invoke the Viennese bells on the day of Mahler's funeral. Likewise, the high B natural in Berio's piece is intoned, rung, exactly 20 times—the number of years Ouder had lived.

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