Opus Number Zoo is a charming, disquieting early work of Berio's, quite unlike what the world has come to know from the composer. Far from the radical polystylism of the Sinfonia, the wrathful theatrical eruptions of Passagio, or the interior self-searches of later works like Requies and Notturno, this little score for wind quintet and multiple narrators from 1951 is fanciful and fangless, somewhat like the composer's Petite Suite for solo piano. It still bites, however, fangs or no fangs, and to this degree is still full of Berio's peculiarly elliptical brand of confrontation.

The wind writing is staunchly "neo-Classical," with its characteristically angular rhythms, transparent textures, and emotional coolness; like Stravinsky's own Wind Octet from 1923 (a neo-Classical foundation stone) and the Italian inheritance of Stravinskian neo-Classicism by Berio's teachers (Ghedini, Malipiero, Dallapiccola), this music speaks through allegory rather than open mouth.

And in this regard, its four movements to texts by Rhoda Levine makes the work come across like miniature version of Stravinsky's other neo-Classical pillar, the musico-theatrical The Soldier's Tale. Both Stravinsky's and Berio's work have a similar fusion of whimsy and wicked tutorial in how to stay out of trouble; Berio seems to nod deliberately in Stravinsky's direction with his combination of rhetorical artifice and an expressive undercurrent which peaks out from behind it. The texts themselves gloss on that otherwise inimitable combination of child's play and old-timer sagacity found in T.S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats—save that these little numbers, so shiny on the surface, have a real nasty little undercurrent.

The opening "Barn Dance" is emblematic: "The fox took the chicken out on the floor, Poor silly chicken didn't know the score," goes the text. Intoned with acute irony, it's accompanied by the mocking gestures of Berio's music and repeats more than a few times the chick's tragic flaw—"she never noticed when the lights went out"—before abruptly announcing "That's all folks." The listening fawn listens of the second movement hears "the cry of bombs...the scream of distant fields...[thinking] what madness of men...to blast all that is lively, lively, proud and gentle. What can the reason be?" The music echoes that extraordinary sonic apparition which overtakes the variation-movement in Stravinsky's Octet—here, as there, the music blanches out all its interstylistic witticisms, and slowly revolves around a denuded, semi-tonal polyphonic undulation.

This number seems to cast a melancholy pall in the rest of the short work, which does little to lighten things. The following number, "The Grey Mouse," narrates an old mouse's bitter spying of new-year festivities, set in repeated staccato duets which releasing occasional melodic fragment. And the final "Tom Cats" opens with a unison which crescendos into an ear-crunching cluster before precipitating a musical game of suspense; the setting is a David-and-Goliath showdown between two feline miscreants, mutually envious of their tail and whiskers. In echt-O. Henry fashion, their combat rids them both of the thing they endeavored to usurp from each other.

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