"Exorcism" was the word Luciano Berio often used to describe his earlier influences; he saw his precursors not as peaks to climb or voices to integrate so much as spirits to possess and purge. For instance, Berio's Due Pezzi for violin and piano from 1952 (when he was 27) were considered by the composer as one of four works in which he came to terms with—and got past—his mentor Luigi Dallapiccola. One of the guiding lights of Italian music in the 1940s and '50s, Dallapiccola was regarded by the younger generation, including Berio, as "a point of reference...not just musical, but also spiritual, moral and cultural." And indeed, Berio's Due Pezzi adopt and play out the Dallapiccolan sound-world quite brilliantly—a sound-world which Berio would soon sweep under the rug.

The first piece, marked "Calmo," is quite astonishing in Berio's output: coming from a composer who confessed that "private motivations...generally leave me cold," it is as heart-on-sleeve as his music gets. But what truly surprises is that, behind the transient influence of Dallapiccola's emotional immediacy, one hears the semaphores and gestures of an older composer, Alban Berg—a composer who, far from being swept under the rug, haunts the later works of Berio ever-more intensely. That series of interlocking perfect fourths, separated by a semitone, which Berg employed as the motivic backbone of his second opera Lulu, is here omnipresent and unconcealed, as is a Bergian lyricism which fuses imploring lines with an emotional ambiguity bordering on the ironic.

The second movement, about half the length of its predecessor, is marked "Quasi allegro, alla marcia," and performs the common trope in Berg's music of following a more intimately expressive number with a genre-piece, whose gestural and constructive strictures work, even chafe, against its heated emotional intensity. The opening gesture of the movement—a unison between single staccato notes on piano and the violin's pizzicato—is yet another striking prefiguration, employing Berio's penchant for single lines composed of multiple timbres, not tonal, and yet, in their revolution through a small gamut of tones, implacably un-serial.

These are all aspects which seem to possess both the music of Berg and of later Berio. But in the Due Pezzi they ring out and shine through, whereas, when they finally do re-materialize in Berio's music after the '70s, they glow a reconfigured light, obsessive, incandescent, and ambiguous.

© Seth Brodsky, All Music Guide