Berio straight to the heart

For some contemporary composers, words are no more than abstract sounds. For Luciano Berio, musicality and textual meaning were not exclusive, but inseparable.

He wrote Stanze shortly before his death last May; here, Pierre-Andre Valade and the Philharmonia Orchestra gave its UK premiere with French baritone Francois Le Roux.

Paul Celan's Tenebrae, the first poem in the sequence, begins "We are near, Lord, near and within reach". Berio set the original German, investing every repetition of "Herr" (Lord) with a slightly ironic solemnity that Le Roux did not overplay. Perhaps the composer felt the piece as valedictory, but that is not how it seemed.

At times Le Roux struggled for vocal evenness, but he registered Berio's almost operatic sense of drama as well as the vocal warmth rejected by many composers of Berio's generation (he was born in 1925).

Strings and winds generated a slowmoving wash of colour, occasionally broken by piano or percussion.

Giorgio Caproni's absurdist The Ceremonious Traveller's Farewell received a delightfully po-faced setting, into which a male chorus interjected sometimes a vocal echo of the soloist, sometimes an agitated contradiction.

In the last song, a setting of The Battle by Dan Pagis, the chorus's gentle crooning contrasted tellingly with the soloist's images of death.

Perhaps it was a valediction after all.

Solo, written in 1999 for trombonist Christian Lindberg (the soloist here), was altogether brighter. At first the trombone created a still point around which the orchestra orientated itself, but soon Lindberg began to rasp, flutter and slide, rousing the orchestral trombones to a lively response.

For the most part, though, the orchestra provided a gentle cushion on which Lindberg stretched out. Playing from memory, Lindberg conjured up gravitas both mock and genuine. Typical Berio, in other words.

Jazz
Greg Osby
Pizza Express, W1

Even in the most free-thinking spheres of music, a touch of common sense never goes amiss. When Greg Osby first arrived, critics hailed his off-centre ear for harmony as the pronouncements of a new Charlie Parker.

The problem was what to do with him. Unlike Parker, he wasn't attracting specific converts, so his record company, Blue Note, put him to work with other free spirits, notably pianist Jason Moran, and the impact of his novelty was lost.

Then last year, Osby enjoyed something of a hit with St Louis Shoes, an album dedicated to his home town.

Significantly, it was his first album of standards, something that finally gave listeners a chance to evaluate him on common ground. Every jazz giant of the past has proved himself in this way.

Remember Albert Ayler? His wild version of Bye Bye Blackbird featured a straightahead Scandinavian rhythm section that enhanced his swaggering originality.

Last night, Osby, paying a rare London visit, unveiled a group that gives his work similar gravitas. Drummer Damion Reid and bassist Matt Brewer are solid players, but the star turn was Megumi Yonezawa, a 30-year-old pianist from Hokkaido, Japan, who followed Osby's improvisations to the darkest corners without losing either the beat or the underlying harmonic thread. She made him sound twice the player.

Still relishing the challenge of "dealing with tried and true material", Osby delivered his disguised standards in a thin tone, incisive but hardly overpowering.

He made his points with the sheer intellectual force of his ideas.

There were moments during Visitation, based on the chords of Bluesette, Toots Thielmans's classic, and Andrew Hill's shapely ballad, Ashes, when we felt like 52nd Street tourists half a century ago, part-recognising the harmonies as a new breed of boppers skilfully dissected the songs of the day. Absorbing music.