Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #257020 in Music
• Released on: 2000-04-15
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Import

Customer Reviews

Live Nono--early and late--brings mixed results
This disc in Col Legno's valuable Collage edition collects live festival performances of works by Luigi Nono, including the world premier performance of his early Due Espressioni. Concentrating on one early work and three late ones, this disc avoids Nono's agitprop political phase in favour of his more meditative work.

Due Espressioni dates from 1953, when Nono was already becoming a big name amongst the young modernist generation. The title summarises the musical content very well--it is a bipartite work, the opening half being largely string-led, with soft chromatic melody; the second half being brusque and aggressive, with powerful percussive eruptions. This mono recording of the premiere is not in great sound, but it's a good performance--conducted by Hans Rosbaud, that invaluable servant of modernism--and the only recording available.

The rest of the disc involves late works. A Carlo Scarpa is a stunning ten-minute orchestral elegy using the most minimal of materials: repeated percussion motifs, and the notes C and E flat--both with microtonal fluctuations. The techniques here might remind one of Giacinto Scelsi's music, but the effect--and atmosphere--conjured up is very different. Where Scelsi's work is transcendental, Nono's is elegiac, nervous and monumental. The performance here, conducted by Michael Gielen, is at least as good as his rival recording on Montaigne.

Nono's only string quartet, Fragment-Stille, an Diotima, comes next. This was the work that clarified his late style--consisting as it does of many fragments played often near the edge of audibility, with long silences between them. This live recording with the Moscow String Quartet doesn't come close to matching the Ardittis' recently reissued recording for intensity--the playing is too fast and lacking in tension.

Finally, Post Prae-Ludium No 1. This is a work for tuba, modified by live electronics, recorded at its world premiere. It's a slow, mostly quiet work, with the soft tuba notes echoed and spatially transformed by the live electronic work. A CD recording--and this appears to be the only one available--can't bring out all the effect of this work when heard live, but it's good to have one all the same.

I'd recommend this disc primarily to those already fans of the composer, since only two of the four works are essential Nono, and the performance of Fragmente-Stille is only partially successful.

all seminal Gigi
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.