Luciano Berio's work is characterized above all by his love of the theatrical, his fascination with the voice, and his constant willingness to engage with music of the past as well as of the present. Drawing on a range of influences that reaches from the poetry of Dante to the politics of Martin Luther King, and from the operas of Monteverdi to the sounds of modern jazz, his output has embraced all the major musical developments of its time, including electronic music, music theatre, and works using quotation and collage - hence one critic's description of him as an "omnivore". (The Rough Guide to Classical Music). See an example of Berio's omnivorous theatrical output in La vera storia (1981), prima parte . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

According to John Murphy at Bardolatry, "Harold Bloom called Macbeth Shakespeare’s most “expressionistic” play. It is only appropriate, then, that America’s most Expressionistic filmmaker, Orson Welles, settled on “The Scottish Play” as his first foray into Bard adaptation. Macbeth (1948) was an appropriate choice for the auteur, considering some kind of curse had apparently befallen the once wined-and-dined star of theatre, radio, and film. The film was produced on the relative cheap (about $500,000), filmed at a breakneck pace (about twenty days), and the result is a haggard, stylized tone poem. This is Shakespeare as lurid film noir. The messy quality somehow makes it more compelling, mostly because Welles’ unsurpassed visual imagination compensates for the low-end production values. See Welles' messy yet brilliant vision - with music by Jacques Ibert . . . it's this week's PYTHEAS SIGHTING.

Jacques Hétu's work, said the conductor Jacques Lacombe, "always bears a very personal signature". Singling out "his lyricism, his harmonic language, his sense of structure, the clarity of his orchestration", Lacombe describes Hétu as "a real musician who knew how to write for musicians, without laying traps for them – not that his music doesn't present challenges or difficulties for its performers. But ... he always wrote well for the orchestra and that is doubtless one of the reasons that orchestral musicians take so much pleasure in playing his music and that he is one of the Québecois and Canadian musicians most performed both at home and internationally." Hear a performance of Hétu's final work, the Symphony No. 5, "Liberté" (2009) . . . one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS.

"Gwyneth Walker work is characterized by a tremendous energy and a strong sense of humor. Even in her most calm and serene pieces, there is a constant undercurrent of energy -- a lifeblood that ties the music together. Many personal stylistic traits appear throughout her work including elements that have often been classified as characteristic of "American music" (including the strong rhythmic sense, open sonorities, and influences of rock, jazz, blues, and American folk music). She is strongly in the American tradition of composers such as Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein -- but is a slave to no compositional school or prescribed style. Her music is recognizably her own and thoroughly original" (Carson P. Cooman). Watch a performance of Walker's Don't Step On My Toes (1993) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.