Next year will be a musical No-no
OrchestrasAmong many anniversaries coming up in 2024 is the centenary of the birth of Luigi Nono, the Venetian modernist and communist who married Arnold Schoenberg’s daughter.
The first major event has just been announced:
Prometeo by Luigi Nono will be staged from 26 to 29 January 2024 in the Church of San Lorenzo, the venue for which it was conceived and was premiered forty years ago. Subtitled ‘a tragedy of listening’, Prometeo is, in Nono’s words, ‘a tragedy composed of sounds, with the complicity of a space’. A work intended solely as an act of listening revolutionising the space, conceived by the Venetian composer in an almost intimate relationship with his city and destined to remain in the history of music, not only as the endpoint of lifelong research, but as an authentic endeavour that in addition to Nono himself, involved great artists, designers, philosophers and musicians, relying on the most impressive and advanced technological complex of the time.
The new adventure of Prometeo, which will bring the Church of San Lorenzo back as a special venue with a structure-set re-imagined by Antonello Pocetti and Antonino Viola, will feature as protagonists the conductor Marco Angius, a sophisticated artisan of sound and a reference for contemporary music at the international level, leading the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto. With them the outstanding musicians on the flute and tuba Roberto Fabbriciani and Giancarlo Schiaffini, who with the wizard of sound Alvise Vidolin on live electronics and Massimo Cacciari, curator of the texts, participated in the legendary original production. With them, important soloists complete the instrumental and vocal ensembles: Carlo Lazari on the viola, Michele Marco Rossi on the cello, Emiliano Amadori on the double bass; the voices of singers Rosaria Angotti, Livia Rado, Chiara Osella, Katarzyna Otczyk, Marco Rencinai, and the narrating voices of Sofia Pozdniakova and Jacopo Giacomoni, in addition to the Coro del Friuli Venezia Giulia.
Prometeo is being revived by La Biennale di Venezia on the centennial of the birth of the great Venetian composer Luigi Nono (29 January 1924), as a Special Project of the Historic Archive of the Contemporary Arts (ASAC) in collaboration with the Fondazione Archivio Luigi Nono, and with TBA21-Academy, the research centre of the Fundación TBA21 which was responsible for the restoration of the Church of San Lorenzo.
photo: Lorenzo Capellini, 1984
Guns will be available at the concession stand throughout the performance for anyone wanting to put themselves out of their misery.
Thanks for the announcement. Prometeo is a masterpiece, the chance to hear it live in the church for which it was written is a truly unique opportunity. Buying my ticket now.
Too late. 4 performances sold out a day after tickets went on sale. Netrebko must be singing, there’s no other possible explanation… 😉
Interestingly, Nono’s “Fragmente –Stille an der Diotoma”, as performed by the La Salle Quartet, finds a place in eclectic rock musician Elvis Costello’s list of “500 albums essential to a happy life”, published in the November 2000 “Vanity Fair”, and easily available online. Morton Feldman also makes the list.
A time capsule from the period when utopia was sought through the ‘beautiful’ idealism of totalitarian communism, destruction of past culture, the implementation of modern technology in every aspect of life, and the happy sounds of the Brave New World that was to come through social engineering:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fP4Hf9jhIU&list=PL9bf907nE0eaH5t4GGo1G3uSe8olShUHK
Did nobody at the time HEAR how dehumanizing it all was? And morbid, aggressive, ugly, and satanic? Unintentionally this work correctly ‘says’ where it is all about.
Why the enthusiasm of the small number of adherents? They recognize their own soul in it, that much is obvious…. cases for Freud’s and Jung’s sofas.
Prometeo is actually deeply humanizing, both on an intellectual level and an emotional level. Its sounds are timeless. I’m sorry it doesn’t speak to you. Clearly it speaks to others though (and not just a “small number of adherents” – see above). It is actually intolerance such as yours that Nono attempts to speak to, you should give Prometeo another chance. 😉
I don’t remember the name of the awful Nono work I had to sit through once – it’s been long since banished from memory, but it offered its listeners darkness, gloom, misery, and suffering. I believe the pain I experienced was only exceeded by some of the compositions I’ve unfortunately heard from Morton Nono and Elliott Nono. Still, the original Nono “distinguishes” himself with his alleged music.
Err…I meant Milton Nono, not Morton Nono. (I’m getting my Nonos all mixed up – my apologies to Morton Nono.
…or is it that one Nono is nearly indistinguishable from all the other Nonos?)
It’s not music, it’s sonic art. That is: the aesthetics of pure sound patterns accompanied with lots of explanation to cover-up the failure of the works to ‘speak’ fopr themselves. And this is not a subjective thing and nothing else, it is soemthing real. Listeners have to forget 1000 years of musical development to be able to call it music.
Art?
It’s good to see you back, JB. 🙂 Your voice has been greatly missed here by some of us.
It was not my fault… it was the IT. And the reluctance of my PA to get it sorted-out by a professional.
Borstlap’s…..BAAAACK! Woe is us! But what happened to “LuigiNoNoNo”? Maybe, posting under a different name.
Wonder what rock Borstlap’s been hiding under.
That rock was a technical blip. But not my blip.
I expect you’ve been busy celebrating Wilder’s victory.
No, that is the greatest disaster struck to NL since the flooding of 1953.
Look at the ridiculous photo… The ‘Great Man’ embracing the ‘healthy space’ of a factory, ready to liberate the workers through his sound art and lift them up to the communist Heavens. I rest my case.
Those big, pseudo-profound later works are arguably the biggest Emperor’s new Clothes of the last century. Fake mystique. A shame, as Louis the Ninth’s earlier works (eg Il Canto Sospeso) are really quite beautiful