Nonetheless Catching Up plus Value. 2025
This Week in Classical Music: February 10, 2025. Nonetheless Catching Up. We’ve missed a number of essential anniversaries over the last month and wish to acknowledge a few of them now. However first, immediately is the birthday of Leontyne Value, one of many best sopranos of the 20th century. She’s with us and turned 98 immediately!
However again to the missed anniversaries. The Italians represent the most important group. First, two essential 20th-century composers: Luigi Dallapiccola, born on February 3rd of 1904, and Luigi Nono, born January 29th of 1924. We posted two entries on Dallapiccola final 12 months (right here and right here). Final 12 months was Nono’s 100th anniversary however we did not commemorate the occasion appropriately. So, this is a brief define of Nono’s life and work.
Luigi Nono was born on January 29th of 1924 in Venice. .jpg "Luigi Nono")
He studied on the Liceo Musicale with the famous composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. In 1946 he met Bruno Maderna, one of many first avant-garde Italian composers. Maderna was solely 4 years older however extra established; as he and Nono have been working in Venice, and a small group of musicians organized themselves round them. Dallapiccola, of an older era however a pal of each, had a big affect on their improvement.
A number of early works by Nono have been offered on the Darmstadt Summer time Programs for New Music, an important gathering of recent composers. Quickly after he grew to become an energetic participant and, along with Boulez and Stockhausen, one of many leaders of the brand new music motion. In 1955 he married Nuria Schoenberg, daughter of Arnold Schoenberg. Nono was a leftist, as have been lots of his fellow composers. A principled anti-fascist, he went a lot additional to the left than many. For instance, his opera Al gran sole carico d’amore, (the libretto for which he co-wrote with Yuri Lyubimov, the director of the unique manufacturing and likewise the director of the well-known Moscow Taganka theater), was loosely based mostly on performs by Bertolt Brecht and contained excerpts of speeches by Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Karl Marx and Lenin. A few of his music composed in the course of the 60s was extraordinarily political and dogmatic. For instance, his Non Consumiamo Marx consists of sounds recorded in the course of the 1968 scholar rebellion in Paris and a voice studying the messages left on the partitions throughout that interval. A way more attention-grabbing piece was his Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto composed over a number of years within the early Nineteen Eighties, the interval when his work grew to become much less political. Prometeo known as “opera,” though the phrase needs to be taken in its unique Italian sense, “work” – it’s a composition for 5 singers, two audio system, a refrain, and a small orchestra, with sounds being electronically manipulated. To rejoice each Nono and Dallapiccola, right here is Luigi Nono’s piece from 1979, Con Luigi Dallapiccola, carried out by the ensemble Percussions de Strasbourg. It’s about 12 minutes of various sound results created by the completely different percussion devices; we expect there’s extra music right here, nevertheless uncommon it’s, than in lots of established compositions.
After which there may be one other Italian, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of many best composers of the Renaissance. He was born between February 3rd of 1525 and February 2nd of 1526. We don’t play him typically sufficient, so irrespective of when his precise birthday was, right here is Palestrina’s late motet, Peccantem me quotidie (I sin daily). Ensemble The Sixteen is led by their founder, Harry Christophers.
