Search - Nono, Arditti, Alberman :: Fragment-Stille, An Diotima

Threadbare ugly beauty of the last century

scarecrow | Chicago, Illinois United States | 11/17/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"We can still ponder this quartet written for the Bonn Festival in 1980.It has a wonderful quality of longevity. Many thought with this feathery light work Nono had abandoned his lifelong passion for Marxism and struggle. But the perception and manipulation of timbre in and of itself was always Nono's lifelong love. He relished in the facts and processes of dodecaphonic complexity in the early serial phases of the Fifties writing impressive works of engaging complexity until the utilization of text hit him and the passion for the timbre of the human voice. His large oratorio-like "Canti d vita e d'amore", where the horrors of Hiroshima are summoned with a private movement for unaccompanied soprano devoted to Algerian militant Djamila Boupacha tortured by the French occupiers. There we find in the first movement, the string body pulverized into fine powerful clustered particles of timbre not dissimilar than Penderecki's masterpiece on the same subject of nuclear terror.

Arditti understands fully what Nono wants, not a pretty timbre, one threadbare,unfinished and ugly,one carrying the weight of the 20th Century,its horrors and challenges with 'at the bridge' timbre, Am Steg, plucked and tremoli with extended high position harmonics, the highest possible on the strings,like fingernails slowly descending down a chalkboard drawing the bow slowly, arco mobile he came to define it.



The other work here entitled "I am sleepwalking" and this resorts to antiphonal positions, where the two violinists walk to inhabit different music stands.Again the music materials are threadbare, mostly harmonics sustained,quite beautiful. This work seems even more extreme in conception than the quartet,more like a sketch for something or nothing, deeply thought through. I don't know another work in the literature that approaches the durational and timbral scope of this. Nono thought we have become accustom to "garbage" with the vagaries and onslaught of the market infiltrating serious music,, we can no longer simply "listen". With practicioners, i.e.Composers who search for the magnetic complacency, the comforts of the "cash box", no more heroic searchings for what music may become or what music may do in terms of redefining itself. Yes Modernity did end, but Nono it seems had some things to place on the conceptual boat prior to its departure to an aesthetic now living in exile.Arditti again find themselves in their own language, they lend an un-impassioned reference,one not many performers can summon, a third person presence. I certainly prefer Arditti's interpretational introspective skills to the arrogant demeanor of Gidon Kremer,also a Nono devotee."