By Alan Rich

“Music is never pure,” wrote Luciano Berio of his Circles, “it is attitude; it is theater.” Berio’s great vocal adventure ended the 1961-62 season of Monday Evening Concerts, to a capacity crowd. It began the 2006-07 season last week, again with a turn-away box office. Much has happened in between; we’ll get to that.

Berio’s late, great works all mirrored his fierce fascination with the interaction of words and sound. Before Circles, there had been a piece dissecting passages from Joyce’s Ulysses through electronic manipulation of sounds and syllables. Circles, even trickier, took poetry of e.e. cummings (which was already involved with fragmenting words and phrases) and broke them up even further so that the poet’s distinctive orthography found its mirror in its musical setting. The Berio legacy is a phenomenal repertory of music-plus-language, spilling over into opera, large-scale choral music, and glorious theatrical works, of which Circles is one.

That work was inspired by, and therefore created for, Berio’s wife at the time, the late, great actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit Cathy Berberian. Last March, when the Philharmonic’s “Minimalist Jukebox” came up with an extraordinary new actress/singer/indefinable creative spirit named Cristina Zavalloni, the whispers started to rise: Is there a new Circles on the horizon? The whispers reached the committee who were struggling to rekindle the Monday Evening Concerts, after that valuable enterprise had been bounced (for no good reason, and several bad) by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the long story was made short last week at REDCAT. Zavalloni was back, as great as we knew she would be; she followed her spellbinding performance of Circles with another of Berberian’s numbers, a monologue made up of comic-strip punch lines. Cristina Berio, daughter of Berberian, looked pleased. Imagine, sitting still while someone just about half your age does your own mom onstage.

It was quite an evening, in fact, a benefit honoring the late Dorrance Stalvey, who had planned and managed the series for its last 34 years, literally single-handed, and made it one of the most adventurous concert programs anywhere in the country — in variety and in quality of performers. This first program bore this out: an established contemporary masterpiece, a respectable piece of new-music academe (by Stalvey himself) and a 40-minute work of genuine challenge by a composer, the late Gérard Grisey, out of the European mainstream, whose music might have lingered long on the doorstep if small organizations like MEC were not at hand to usher it in.

Three more Monday Evenings are in the works for this season, all at Zipper Concert Hall (across from Disney). The next, on February 19, will focus on young American composers.

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