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Nono: Orchestral works & chamber music

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Luigi Nono was an influential composer in postwar Europe. He was heard less frequently in America, due in part to his politics. There are few composers of Nono's generation still active. There are fewer still who have maintained much of an audience. The passage of time pushes aside most composers in order to make room for new ones. Many of these recordings aren't going to make the passage from CD to whatever comes next. Sometimes that's a pity.

The first recording on the CD, "Due Esspressioni" is very much a product of its time. An orchestral piece in two sections, it breaks decisively away from the prewar aesthetic of neo-classicism. The first part features very long lines in the strings, with wind chords drifting in and out of the texture. The second part is made of a sort of broken counterpoint, with a strong punch/counterpunch feel. The recording itself was of some historical interest to me. It dates to 1953, and it is in stereo. At the time of performance, there was no outlet for stereo recordings: the stereo LP and stereo radio broadcasts were in the future. Some forward-looking engineer went the extra mile to make it. If he's still around, I hope he feels appreciated.

The second piece "A Carlo Scarpa" is the type of experimental piece that persisted for a decade or so. It is centered on two pitches, roughly a minor third apart, with nearly every microtone in the vicinity. I think the intent is to ease sounds in and out of the texture, but the performance is a little rough and the acoustic space is far from gracious. While it is capable of transporting you back to an earlier ethos, there's not really much music in it.

"Fragmente-Stille" is an interesting take on the string quartet. In some ways (primarily its spareness) it's reminiscent of Morton Feldman. But the language is quite different--generally darker. It's a live performance, with all the attendant noises. But that adds a certain realism and sense of excitement. There's another performance of this piece by the Arditti Quartet that provides a nice contrast. Thei Ardittti performance is a little more astringent, but both are quite nice.

The CD ends with "Post-Prae-Ludium" for tuba and live electronics. I think in many ways that it conveys best what Nono was after. From the best I can tell, all sounds originate with the tuba and are then modified by the electronics. There's a great sense of distance and more than a little loneliness in this. It's quite haunting.

Luigi Nono probably isn't for everyone, and you can't find a lot of composers who've been strongly influenced by his work. But it's still worth giving a listen.

Here you have encysted great works by Luigi, and comprehensive, diapasonal conductors. Hans Rosbaud was an early effulgence visionary, taught the young Boulez the timbral fastidiousness we all need.Sorry Boulez never conducted any late Nono concoctions.And Michael Gielen,who has championed Nono's late works.
The "espressione" 2 is quite an early work impacted,with high intensity,the palindromic half-step. This is an early recording from the Fifties, stridently rendered, walls of timbre. It reveals an impassioned young erudite man efficacious,dyspeptic at times for the espousal of Marxism cojoined with the elan,the dysgenically dodecaphonic means.
We leave the young Luigi to warp speed to the seminal works the last decade of his life,dedications was a fecund means of Luigi rendering differing states of timbre. Carlo Scarpa was a noted Venetian architect.Scarpa's aesthetic had no real direct impression on Nono, it was more the man's deep sense of creativity, his working lifeworld concept. This work is to me like a haunted requiem, Nono had come to beleive that the culture of the west was at the end of illusion, tragedia d'ascolto, the tragedy of listening largely homogenized with market forces. This dedication to Scarpa is like appraising timbre under a microscope,mists of microintervallic timbres, barely audible, with graphic petrified like extended plucking with coloristic bongo hits,all gentle, delicate in the string body. The impacted sound then of the trombones, all on low Fs, together.
Nono sought to discover new roads, new silences, new intervals, and he did in this work.
Likewise the 'Fragment Stille und Diotema', caused an endemic stur at its premiere in Bonn,in 1980. Again we appraise timbre microscopically,lachrymal feathery moments.
Live electronics as well was a new creative preserve for Gigi, and Giancarlo Schiaffini was part of his new timbral cadre, with Carlo Scarponi,clarinetist,or Stefano Scondanibbio,contrabassist, and Roberto Fabricciani, flutes, The Tubist playes into a 30 second delay,rendering an effect like a grotto, a cave, with extended sonorities played with some degree of performative freedoms,'percorsi', or paths are chosen by the performer, playing falsetto tones, normal, half-valved(more percussive), multiphonics, when you sing and play simultaneously. This gives way to a concluding sections of a low mastodonic C,played like an impassioned wounded whale,laggardly rendered, yet with a degree of humanity of nature.