While Kabul falls, Intolleranza rules

While Kabul falls, Intolleranza rules

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norman lebrecht

August 18, 2021

Few critics have remarked the disconnect between a moneyed Salzburg audience warching Luigi Nono’s salon-socialist opera and the unfolding tragedy in Afghanistan where a medieval clique has siezed power with western arms.

Nono, a pet composer of the leftwing Abbado clique, based his ‘scenic action’ on Brecht and his music, in part, on the atonalities of his father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg.

The only performance I ever heard was a patchwork quilt of scenic inhumanities, a very long 80 minutes.

Its revival this summer seems at once timely and unworldly. It will make little difference to Nono’s dated reputation.

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