The concert began with "Serenata per un satellite," a diversion by the late Bruno Maderna, Mr. Berio's friend and fellow modernist. And if it seems odd that an atonal modernist work could be diverting, maybe we need to revise our thoughts about modernists. Their hearts beat, too, and there's no reason they can't be amusing. Maderna compiled an assortment of musical fragments for an orchestra to play, more or less ad lib, guided only by a conductor -- Mr. Berio, this evening -- who signals when each musician should begin. We could smile at the results, and say they're close to what we'd get if Maderna had written his piece the normal way and now we were hearing the musicians practicing their parts at random, while the orchestra warmed up. But Maderna was smarter than that, and the "Serenata" had a distinct, twittering charm, clearly due to delighted musical planning. In a more thoughtful world, maybe we'd hear music like this at pops concerts.
Once "Alternatim" began, all analysis seemed beside the point. The clarinet and viola seesawed on a random breeze, the musical balance tilting first toward one, then to the other. Mr. Berio has the traditional Italian gift for melody, and this opening duet was simply irresistible, though of course the melodies were freely sculpted, hardly traditional either in their harmony or in their elusive rhythm.
But then anyone familiar with contemporary life is used to things -- movies, art, relationships -- whose meaning can't quite be pinned down. And in fact the difficulty of Mr. Berio's music has been wildly exaggerated. Anyone who looks at abstract painting should be able to follow it. When you look at a canvas by Mark Rothko (to pick a painter nearly at random) you don't expect to see a portrait or a landscape. Instead you see darkened shapes, contrasts of subdued colors, edges that are vague and soft; you feel, perhaps, a sense of deep emotion, unspecified and tentative, but unmistakable.
In a Cy Twombly drawing, you see squiggles; in Jackson Pollock, a riot of curves and splatters. Why, then, should you have any problem noticing -- in "Alternatim" -- the easy sliding of the soloists, massed clouds of sound from the orchestra, abrupt jagged leaps of melody, sudden hesitations, or places where the music swirls around a single note? All you have to do is listen -- take nothing for granted and accept what your ears are telling you.
If the music didn't change enough, the fault was Mr. Berio's, but as conductor, not composer. Standing before the O.R.T. Orchestra della Toscana, his gestures were rhythmically precise, but never varied. The musicians, watching him, were left on their own to find variety of touch and tone.

This didn't hurt "Ofanim" as much. (Though Mr. Berio's bad conducting is notorious; why does he persist?) "Ofanim" -- impressively scored for double boys' choir, two groups of instrumentalists, and a female vocal soloist who rose like a ghost from the shadows of her crumpled robes -- digs very deep. The children's voices sounded innocent and distant (bravo to the American Boychoir for its performance), while the instruments suggested currents in the earth below. Variety of detail didn't matter as it did in "Alternatim," because the music coalesced into blocks, slabs, batholiths of sound, which hovered timelessly, turning instrumental gestures into ripples on the surface of the stone.
The singer, mezzo-soprano Esti Kenan Ofri, with a voice too roughly textured to be fully classical, was like a synthesis of rock and flesh, a presence both sensual and prehistoric. "Every motion is arrested," wrote Mr. Berio, quoted in the program notes, which finally drew blood. "Every light is extinguished. The scented orchard gives way to a withered vineyard, and the image of the Mother, uprooted from her land and cast down to a 'dry and thirsty ground,' evokes the memory of all the mothers of our time, of all the exiles and the havocs that have left deep wounds in our conscience."
It's time to stop talking of such works -- as the speaker before the concert did, along with most of the written commentary -- as if they're nothing but experiments in musical language. Those experiments were made, were welcome in the generation after World War II, and are largely over. Mr. Berio, now 72, is no longer in the avant-garde; for current relevance (even though "Alternatim" and "Ofanim" were both premiered this year), he's been superseded by a range of simpler, more direct and more colloquial composers.
But precisely for that reason, we need to hear him now, and not just him -- we also need to hear Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Györgi Ligeti, Milton Babbitt, and a host of other modernists who for years made concertgoers grit their teeth. We owe Carnegie Hall a great debt for presenting Mr. Berio (who was also heard in conversation at Carnegie's Weill Recital Hall the night after this event). But now we need more. We need a sweeping retrospective, so that -- free at last from the old insistence that we have to like them -- we can hear the modernists with innocent ears, and listen to their works simply as music.

Wall Street Journal, November 6, 1997