It looks like—from the very beginning—Berio was a good composer; those out there with professional jealousies toward his astounding prolificacy, professionalism, and utterly assured sense of "voice" will be given no consolation from even an early student work like his Petite Suite, written in 1947 while Berio was studying at the Milan Conservatory. His first work to be performed in public, it is an entirely passable essay in the neo-Classical style then prominent in Italian music, and inherited from Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Prokofiev, and above all, the post-Rite of Spring Stravinsky. The score is also the first in a series of works documenting Berio's fearless, brilliant solution to overcoming one's formative influences—imitation. A variant of the "If ya can't beat 'em, join 'em" strategy, the method has often been called "exorcism" by Berio. Whatever its ultimate musico-scientific classification, it certainly enlightens anyone wanting to trace Berio's extraordinary historical knowledge and gift for stylistic multiplicity.

What's interesting about the Petite Suite in particular is its immersion in a style that was already bound up in historical reference and stylistic quotation. The suite's opening prelude is on many ways fake Stravinsky, but of course the kind of Stravinsky Berio was imitating was actually Stravinsky's own fake Bach, complete with motoric "sewing machine" polyphony, imitative counterpoint, and meticulously "misplaced" tonalities. The ending cadence, a beautiful triad in the (seemingly) wrong place, is echt-Igor. Of the two airs, "Air I" is right out of Debussy's Children's Corner suite; its modal harmonies and parallel movements are even articulated with a textural play evocative of Debussyian pianism. The second air nods to Prokofiev by playing his famous game: A truly beautiful melody in the right hand is burdened, and occasionally swamped, by a left-hand that, per Berio's explicit instructions to the pianist, exaggerates (ending on a sinister tritone, the number also sounds uncannily like a precursor to the solo pieces of jazz pianist Brad Mehldau). The concluding "Gigue," with its inversion of first and second section, acknowledges Bach as the font; but there are also hints of Berio's later works for the instrument, especially Sequenza IV's ecstatic pianism, constantly trembling to break out of a mere ten fingers and run along the entire keyboard.

Ultimately, little of the Petite Suite's sound touches Berio's music from the '60s onward. But the disposition of that work and its basic assumptions—that "the music itself" already exists and that the composer's main labor is to distort it and elaborate—remains powerfully intact through Berio's latest compositions.

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