Nonetheless Catching Up plus Value. 2025
This Week in Classical Music: February 10, 2025. Nonetheless Catching Up. We’ve missed a number of necessary anniversaries over the last month and wish to acknowledge a few of them now. However first, as we speak is the birthday of Leontyne Value, one of many biggest sopranos of the 20th century. She’s with us and turned 98 as we speak!
However again to the missed anniversaries. The Italians represent the most important group. First, two necessary 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 yr (right here and right here). Final yr was Nono’s 100th anniversary however we did not commemorate the occasion appropriately. So, here 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 technology however a buddy of each, had a big affect on their growth.
A number of early works by Nono have been offered on the Darmstadt Summer season Programs for New Music, an important gathering of latest composers. Quickly after he turned an lively 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 in addition the director of the well-known Moscow Taganka theater), was loosely primarily based 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 throughout the 60s was extraordinarily political and dogmatic. For instance, his Non Consumiamo Marx consists of sounds recorded throughout the 1968 scholar rebellion in Paris and a voice studying the messages left on the partitions throughout that interval. A way more fascinating piece was his Prometeo, tragedia dell’ascolto composed over a number of years within the early Eighties, the interval when his work turned much less political. Prometeo known as “opera,” though the phrase must 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 have fun 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 totally different percussion devices; we expect there’s extra music right here, nonetheless uncommon it’s, than in lots of established compositions.
After which there’s one other Italian, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, one of many biggest 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 regardless of when his precise birthday was, right here is Palestrina’s late motet, Peccantem me quotidie (I sin every single day). Ensemble The Sixteen is led by their founder, Harry Christophers.