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This is as good as it gets. What was it that Stravinsky said about Schoenberg? "The twilight that got mistaken for the dawn." Well, near the end of this music's reign (such as it was), Notturno won (deservedly so, in my opinion) the Pulitzer Prize and it all looked like it was gonna happen. But then...but I won't bore you with a recap of the revolutions of the late '70s - early '80s. Coming back to Notturno, though, after many years away, it is a masterful piece in the way that it focuses on color and gesture within this extremely rarified pitch language. In that respect, I feel that it is unequaled. Those pesky pitches, though! You may not love them. I'm not really sure I love them - I mean, there are so many of them! And they do that advanced serial/combinatorial THING. But, hey, they do it so well - and Martino's time around the orbit of such a 12 - tone lyrical master as Dallapiccola has really finally borne fruit here.
For my money, Pianississimo returns us to more what we expect from this musical world: a brilliant, disjunct surface without so much to engage one, unless one is a hyper - partisan. It's an extremely serious work, and I'm very sympathetic to its aims. But the time when this kind of music could really appeal to me on a visceral level is long, long gone, I'm afraid. Also, if you let your mind wander, this piece can sound as arbitrary as Cage's Music of Changes, and not nearly as much fun!
Triple Concerto returns us to Martino's heroic (if ultimately somewhat quixotic) attempt to create high drama and pathos within this musical world. For my ears, though, there's one major misstep here: the gestural vocabulary of the three soloists is too similar, and that leads to an unintentionally cartoonish effect (like Mama Wolf, Papa Wolf, and Baby Wolf). This was an issue that Elliott Carter was able to address in his Double Concerto, for example. But, let's be honest, next to Martino, Carter seems downright "universal"!
So, what is left to say? If you don't know what all that Columbia/Princeton Axis fuss was all about and you want to, this is a must - have, a top - ten? Well, something like that...Anyway, that'll do for now.
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