infotext:
THE CLAY AS A NUCLEUS Unfortunately, Luigi Nono published very little on the aesthetics of his late work, which is why it seems legitimate to report here on a lecture he gave in 1983 as part of a seminar at the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO in Freiburg. Based on a spectral analysis, which he had carried out for the flute together with Hans Peter Haller and Roberto Fabbriciani, he found that a miked single tone of this instrument, when played appropriately, is either sinusoidal or, when played in a differentiated way with wind noises such as differently emphasized overtones, » diverse as a Beethoven symphony« (Nono) could be, and thus unique in contrast to the sine tone. He compared this uniqueness with Leibniz's leaf metaphor. A leaf viewed from a distance resembles all other leaves on a tree, but under the microscope, the equivalent of the microphone, it is unmistakable and as individual as a fingerprint. This individuation of the single note was the starting point for Nono's work with live electronics, whereby his recourse to the inner Beethoven symphony in no way contained the idea of reviving traditional forms. On the contrary, it was precisely the explosion of a type of form with exposition, development and predictable recapitulation that fascinated him. The sound analysis and sound conversion processes possible in the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO gave him a glimpse into infinity, a departure into a new musical consciousness of time, even if he named Giordano Bruno, a philosopher from the Cinquecento of all people, with the quote »successiuamente á tempi et tempi giongendo lume a lume" (which strings up light after light over time). Detlef Heusinger RISONANZE ERRANTI POST-PRAE-LUDIUM PER DANUBE The works for the music theater, Intolleranza 1960 (1960/61) and Al gran sole carico d'amore (1972/74), summarized the preceding decades of Luigi Nono's work and created caesuras after which the composer set out for new shores. However, in the four years after Al gran sole Nono composed almost nothing; than his string quartet in 1980 Fragments - Silence, To Diotima premiered with the LaSalle Quartet, with this work related to Friedrich Hölderlin he no longer seemed to be recognizable as the »politically engaged« composer he had been classified as. As his next goal he described »Prometheus«, a new »Azione Musica« for the Frankfurt Opera. All works Nono after the string quartet up to this monumental Prometheus composed, are paths that lead directly to this; those that were composed after the composer's death in 1990 follow on Prometheus and lead to further, still undeveloped »landscapes«. Of central importance for Nono on the way to the Prometeo and after that since 1979 was the wealth of new tonal possibilities that the live electronics of the EXPERIMENTALSTUDIOS in Freiburg offered him. Hardly any work is for the search for Nono's new ways after the Prometheus as outstanding in its radicalism as the ones created in 1986 Resonance erranti for alto, flute/piccolo, tuba/trombone, percussion and live electronics. They were first performed on March 15, 1986 in Cologne with Susanne Otto under the baton of the composer and conductor Peter Hirsch and were revised several times by the composer for a series of subsequent performances. »Errant resonances« of the instruments like the singing voice. For the final version, Nono took four poems by Herman Melville (1819–1891) from his Battle Pieces and from Ingeborg Bachmann's poem No delicatessen only single words selected: »deep abyss«, »pain crime«, »hunger – tears – darkness«, »despairing«, »death«, »despair«: A landscape of abandonment, hopelessness and death. The Resonance erranti are Luigi Nono's »Winter Journey«, at the end of which a Fragment finale sospeso! with questions - me? you? he? she? it? we? her? – the last with the performance marking »duro, like accusation, lasciando sospeso«. But there is another, historical dimension: "Echoes from Guillaume de Machaut, Josquin Desprez and Johannes Ockeghem" is what the title page of the score calls them, but only two or three opening tones of each of these early music works from the distant 14th and 15th centuries. Centuries Nono has quoted. They are sung by the voice and the instruments and brought into new sound spaces by the live electronics; on the other hand, Melville's fragments from the American Civil War and from Ingeborg Bachmann's catastrophic "Thirtieth Year" each use their own sound spaces. The instruments create harsh pitch and dynamic contrasts and Nono simultaneously explores fluid transitions between vocal, instrumental and the electronically transformed sounds. The vast spaces of Dantes Inferno seem invoked (3:22): »Quivi, sospiri, pianti et alti guai / Risonavan per l'aer senza stelle« (sighs, lamentations and woes / echo in starless nights) – very close and another world at the same time. And again and again the hard beats of the bongos, the very gentle crotales and the mysterious Sardinian bells seem to get lost in wide spaces and long pauses between the fragment islands. »She didn't sing roles, but lived on the razor blade« wrote Ingeborg Bachmann about Maria Callas. Exactly such borderline situations with Melville, Bachmann and Luigi Nono. With the goal – according to Nono – for the listener »to expand everything, to deepen everything, in order to create other changes, changes, human, feeling, social, reform, thinking«. The title Post-prae-ludium by Danube for tuba and live electronics indicates Nono's intention to compose a series of solo works with and for performers with whom he had worked closely since beginning work at EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO - in this case the tuba player Giancarlo Schiaffini. He played this almost 14-minute work for the first time on October 17, 1987 in Donaueschingen. The connection of pre- and post ludium in the title stands for the notion of a "simultaneity" that is characteristic of late Nono's thinking, a "as well as". It can also be related to the equality of performer and composer, of live sound and electronics. The Post-prae-ludium consists of two parts that are connected by a contrasting middle section. The first part (approx. 5:20) is determined by delays of 5, 7, 10 and 15 seconds overlaid live electronically; the tuba plays very softly in the highest register, then with simultaneous falsetto singing, with vibrato and normal singing voice. The sound comes from four loudspeakers set up in the performance room. After about 1:40 of the middle section in the high register (around c2/f2) there is a fall to the lowest contra-C in the ppppp, after a good two minutes the c follows again, surrounded by micro-intervals1/f1. The last part is a gradual tonal and dynamic extension and amplification with an axial tone f1 of the tuba that has changed in terms of timbre. The first head of the Freiburg EXPERIMENTALSTUDIOS, Hans Peter Haller, vividly described how Luigi Nono understood his joint work with the performers and the live electronics: It is not important whether something was beautiful, correct, virtuosic and correct, it is more important Nono was the "human side of the performance"; everything can be perfect, but too clean - because without the decisive daring extreme risk. That applied to the composer himself, the performers and the listeners. Juerg Stenzl |
program:
[01] Resonance erranti a Massimo Cacciari (1986/1987)* 40:18
for contralto, flute, tuba, percussionists and live electronics
ENSEMBLE EXPERIMENTAL
Suzanne Otto, alto
Roberto Fabbriciani, flute
Klaus Burger, tuba
Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Jean-Paul Bernard, Bernard Lesage, François Papirer
Keiko Nakamura and Olaf Tzschoppe
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIO of the SWR
Sound direction & music computing:
Reinhold Braig, Joachim Haas, and Gregorio Karman
Supervisor: Andre Richard
Detlef Heusinger, conductor
[02] Post-prae-ludium by Danube (1987) 13: 39
for tuba and live electronics
Klaus Burger, tuba
EXPERIMENTAL STUDIO of the SWR
Sound direction & music computing: Michael Acker, Joachim Haas
Supervisor: Andre Richard
total time: 54:08
*World Premiere Recording
Press:
12/2011
6/2011
20.10.2011
The beauty of despair
Interpretation:
Sound quality:
repertoire value:
Booklets:
25 years have passed since the premiere of the first version of Luigi Nono's composition 'Risonanze erranti' for mezzo-soprano, flute, tuba, six percussionists and live electronics (1986/87) in 1986. The fact that it took just as long until a recording of this central work from Nono's late phase was published for the first time has to do with the difficult source situation of the compositions from this period, whose live electronic parts - and thus the basis for an adaptation of the work's rendition in different premises - were often only insufficiently fixed and had to be adapted to the requirements of a current performance. The fact that the piece has been performed more frequently in recent years and thus gained experience for the production of the recording that has now been released by NEOS is gratifying and testifies to the meticulous preparation. The publication thus joins seamlessly with the series of realizations of Nono's works that have been recorded on audio carriers in recent years and closes a sensitive gap.
Basically, the 'Risonanze erranti' is a kind of 'winter journey' - a comparison that is fully justified by the subtitle 'song cycle', although the music is only remotely reminiscent of one: a cyclically conceived music of despair , as Nono has never formulated it again. Scraps of words that move through the room on different paths and become complexes of sound, repeatedly cut up by the hard hits of the bongos or the high notes of the crotales and piccolo, fragments of a language – Nono chooses Herman Melville and Ingeborg Bachmann as the starting point – that express their Content only reveals in individual moments. It is the deep silence between the brief, sometimes scream-like outbursts that attracts the listener, but also the circling of the vocal and instrumental sounds in the room achieved via live electronics and the resulting structure of a sonorous architecture: thanks to technically well thought-out realization, magic arises here Moments full of subtlety that even if you only listen to the SACD on a stereo player will not fail to impress, and ideally even give the impression that you are actually attending a performance and sitting amidst the sounds.
The recording also relies on several interpreters from the very beginning: the nuanced singing of the alto Susanne Otto, sometimes condensed into moments of maximum concentration, has still not lost any of its fascination, and Roberto Fabbriciani performs his flute part with his own knowledge of Nono's late work . A new addition is the tuba player Klaus Burger, who, like the musicians of the Percussions de Strasbourg, fits perfectly into the playback supervised by the experimental studio of the SWR and directed by Detlef Heusinger. The latter has meanwhile worked itself so deeply into the music that all the remnants of uncertainty that could be heard in live performances of the work a few years ago have fallen by the wayside. This paves the way for the development of a beauty and fragility that has remained unique to Nono's work.
As a supplement to the approximately 40-minute work, Nono's 'Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau' for tuba and live electronics (1987) proves to be a first-class, ideal choice: the solo composition, at the time of its premiere due to the new blowing techniques required and their Combination with live electronic sound conversion, confronting its interpreters with completely new tasks, is now part of the core repertoire of modern music for tuba. Burger's implementation is fascinating: the musician creates a world of sensitively formed, round and often sensual sounds, which he fills with enormous presence even in the extremely quiet range. Couldn't have asked for a better ending to this production.
dr Stefan Drees
http://magazin.klassik.com/reviews/reviews.cfm?TASK=REVIEW&RECID=21127&REID=12960
01.10.2011
10/2011
10/2011
New CDs with new music, listened to by Max Nyffeler
In the fragmentary, live-electronically transformed vocal and instrumental sound of Luigi Nono's "Risonanze erranti" (1986/87), the "Prometeo" still resonates.· But under the influence of the depressive-nihilistic texts by Ingeborg Bachmann and·Herman, among others Melville, the work structure is now taken to the limit of self-dissolution.
The Ensemble Experimental, conducted by Detlef Heusinger, sharpens the contrasts accordingly: the bongos, which have come to the fore, bang, the dissonances hurt, the long pauses are almost too long.
A clear, technically flawless recording from the SWR EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO.
The processually flickering tuba solo "Post-prae-ludium per Donau" is a good addition
26.09.2011
Two works from Luigi Nono's later period: moving musical evidence of a restless search in the absolutely unknown.
Released on sound carrier for the first time worldwide: the Risonanze erranti for low alto voice, piccolo or bass flute, trombone or tuba, six percussionists and live electronics. A masterpiece apostrophized as a “song cycle” in the aftermath, among other things, of the monumental “tragedy of hearing” Prometeo, for which Nono's artist friend, the philosopher and dedicatee Massiomo Cacciari had compiled the text corpus. There, between insular musical formations of urgency, there had still been the idea of real traces of a path-like network; in the risonanze erranti, however, there is no rigor of direction. What are actually composed are wandering, wandering resonances – in many ways contrasting sound events and vocal evocations in a sea of silence.
Despite occasional impulse attacks from the bongos or bloodcurdling, shrill piccolo fluttering tongues: the impression of the work, which lasts around forty minutes and is full of mythical echo chambers and time-lost listening, clearly has ritual traits. The echo of historical moments and the appearance of future signs stir in the electro-acoustically alienated space-time coordinates. Because Nono's late music listens above all to the front, to the open. Even if – as in the Risonanze erranti – it is darkly tinted. Because the work, whose fragmented song of misfortune and wasteland, of doubt and abyss is based on fragments of words from the poetry of Herman Melville and Ingeborg Bachmann, in whose structure tone seals from lamentations by Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin are borrowed, Nono was considered a winter journey "in my heart". Of course: a music that wanders in the horizon of existential questions looking for the new, the unheard of, can, no: must appear strange at first glance, perhaps even strange to some listeners. However, those who are up for the adventure - and the fantastic interpreters, as well as the virtuoso live electronic sound magicians of the SWR experimental studios, have succeeded under Detlef Heusinger in a recording full of presence and momentary magic, the paradox of a balance in the ground, sky and directionless - will have experiences that cannot leave you indifferent.
As already indicated in the title, the second recorded piece also has something to do with the relativity of temporality: Klaus Burger, an exceptional brass player, realized Nono's Post-prae-ludium n.1987 per Donau for bass tuba and live music, which premiered in Donaueschingen in 1. Electronics. Making music without a net and a false bottom; risk, risk, concentration of design; and successful, exhilarating immersion in a band of sound inside full of life.
Helmut Rohm
http://www.br-online.de/br-klassik/cd-tipps/cd-aktuell-klassik-cd-luigi-nono-ID1317129861719.xml
15.09.2011
The biggest project of Luigi Nono's last decade was the composition of Prometeo, the "tragedy for listening" first performed in 1984. In the pieces that followed, up to his death in 1990, Nono built on the new world of electro-acoustic possibilities he had opened up in that work, and of those, perhaps the most extraordinary is Risonanze Erranti for contralto, bass flute, tuba, percussionists and live electronics, which first appeared in 1987, though Nono continued to revise the score for each subsequent performance. It has remained the most elusive of the late works, and this meticulous recording is its first appearance on disc.
Based on texts by Herman Melville (from his civil war Battle Pieces) and Ingeborg Bachmann (her poem Kein Delikatessen), as well as quoting fragments from 14th- and 15th-century songs by Machaut, Josquin and Ockeghem, Risonanze Erranti is an almost frighteningly bleak and austere work, in which every word seems suspended in its own time and space, and interspersed with sounds conjured from flute, tuba and the electronic transformations that envelope them, punctuated by fierce percussion attacks. Also from 1987, Post-prae-ludium Donau is very obviously a splinter from the same creative block, placing a solo tuba at the center of a web of electronic refractions and echoes. Both works are strangely beautiful, mysterious and totally compelling.
Andrew Clements
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/15/nono-risonanze-erranti-review
15.09.2011
ROOM MADE OF SOUND
The late work of Luigi Nono (+1992) is characterized by a microscopic look into the depths of sound. Such explorations were made possible by computer-assisted live electronic sound manipulations. The music on this CD was realized by the experimental studio of the SWR, with which Nono had already worked closely in the 1980s.
In the 1986/87 Risonanze erranti, which has now been recorded for the first time, Nono sets a low alto, a flute and tuba against an ensemble of five percussionists, with the basic colors remaining clearly identifiable throughout the entire piece. The "breathing sounds" of the voice and wind instruments, transformed by playing techniques and electronics, are often confronted with hard, rhythmically pointed interjections that set clear caesuras.
As is usually the case in Nono's late work, the texture is extremely rich in the exhaustion of timbres, while at the same time being very thinned out and fragmented. Individual sound events manifest themselves for a moment, floating in space, wandering around, making fleeting contact with other elements, only to fade away again into the stillness of space. An enigmatic balance ensures that this game of wandering resonances does not fall apart. Despite the relatively open architecture, an atmosphere of ritualistic severity is created that evokes associations with Asian theater, with the sounds appearing and disappearing like people.
This dramatic impression is supported by the expressiveness that Nono knows how to create by embedding violent outbursts of forte in sound events on the threshold of silence. He also integrates fragments of polyphonic Renaissance compositions into the music. These 'broken beauties' always provide the familiar rhetorical or gestural impression of lost bel canto worlds.
Post-prae-ludium per Donau, composed in 1987, seems much more abstract. Nono concentrates here on the tuba, whose electronic transformation is very extensive. It is not always possible to say with certainty whether it is instrumental or natural sounds or even human singing. From the volume and layering of the sound, Nono forms his own sound space that seems to listen into maritime depths or cosmic expanses. In the end, the music consumes itself in a mysterious spectral glow.
The interpretations by the Ensemble Experimental, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and the sound engineers of the SWR Experimental Studio are exemplary in their combination of expressive severity and sensual abstraction.
George Henkel
http://www.musikansich.de/review.php?id=10508
German Record Critics' Prize 4/2011 for Luigi Nono
The jury members of the “German Record Critics’ Award” association award the NEOS production “Luigi Nono: Risonanze erranti, Post-prae-ludium per Donau.” NEOS 11119 by being included in the 4/2011 leaderboard.
Long passages of silence, sudden outbursts, resonances wandering in space: Luigi Nono's "Risonanze erranti" explore the limits of hearing
(For the jury Thomas Meyer)
Awards & Mentions:
12/2011
6/2011
20.10.2011
The beauty of despair
Interpretation:
Sound quality:
repertoire value:
Booklets:
25 years have passed since the premiere of the first version of Luigi Nono's composition 'Risonanze erranti' for mezzo-soprano, flute, tuba, six percussionists and live electronics (1986/87) in 1986. The fact that it took just as long until a recording of this central work from Nono's late phase was published for the first time has to do with the difficult source situation of the compositions from this period, whose live electronic parts - and thus the basis for an adaptation of the work's rendition in different premises - were often only insufficiently fixed and had to be adapted to the requirements of a current performance. The fact that the piece has been performed more frequently in recent years and thus gained experience for the production of the recording that has now been released by NEOS is gratifying and testifies to the meticulous preparation. The publication thus joins seamlessly with the series of realizations of Nono's works that have been recorded on audio carriers in recent years and closes a sensitive gap.
Basically, the 'Risonanze erranti' is a kind of 'winter journey' - a comparison that is fully justified by the subtitle 'song cycle', although the music is only remotely reminiscent of one: a cyclically conceived music of despair , as Nono has never formulated it again. Scraps of words that move through the room on different paths and become complexes of sound, repeatedly cut up by the hard hits of the bongos or the high notes of the crotales and piccolo, fragments of a language – Nono chooses Herman Melville and Ingeborg Bachmann as the starting point – that express their Content only reveals in individual moments. It is the deep silence between the brief, sometimes scream-like outbursts that attracts the listener, but also the circling of the vocal and instrumental sounds in the room achieved via live electronics and the resulting structure of a sonorous architecture: thanks to technically well thought-out realization, magic arises here Moments full of subtlety that even if you only listen to the SACD on a stereo player will not fail to impress, and ideally even give the impression that you are actually attending a performance and sitting amidst the sounds.
The recording also relies on several interpreters from the very beginning: the nuanced singing of the alto Susanne Otto, sometimes condensed into moments of maximum concentration, has still not lost any of its fascination, and Roberto Fabbriciani performs his flute part with his own knowledge of Nono's late work . A new addition is the tuba player Klaus Burger, who, like the musicians of the Percussions de Strasbourg, fits perfectly into the playback supervised by the experimental studio of the SWR and directed by Detlef Heusinger. The latter has meanwhile worked itself so deeply into the music that all the remnants of uncertainty that could be heard in live performances of the work a few years ago have fallen by the wayside. This paves the way for the development of a beauty and fragility that has remained unique to Nono's work.
As a supplement to the approximately 40-minute work, Nono's 'Post-Prae-Ludium per Donau' for tuba and live electronics (1987) proves to be a first-class, ideal choice: the solo composition, at the time of its premiere due to the new blowing techniques required and their Combination with live electronic sound conversion, confronting its interpreters with completely new tasks, is now part of the core repertoire of modern music for tuba. Burger's implementation is fascinating: the musician creates a world of sensitively formed, round and often sensual sounds, which he fills with enormous presence even in the extremely quiet range. Couldn't have asked for a better ending to this production.
dr Stefan Drees
http://magazin.klassik.com/reviews/reviews.cfm?TASK=REVIEW&RECID=21127&REID=12960
01.10.2011
10/2011
10/2011
New CDs with new music, listened to by Max Nyffeler
In the fragmentary, live-electronically transformed vocal and instrumental sound of Luigi Nono's "Risonanze erranti" (1986/87), the "Prometeo" still resonates.· But under the influence of the depressive-nihilistic texts by Ingeborg Bachmann and·Herman, among others Melville, the work structure is now taken to the limit of self-dissolution.
The Ensemble Experimental, conducted by Detlef Heusinger, sharpens the contrasts accordingly: the bongos, which have come to the fore, bang, the dissonances hurt, the long pauses are almost too long.
A clear, technically flawless recording from the SWR EXPERIMENTALSTUDIO.
The processually flickering tuba solo "Post-prae-ludium per Donau" is a good addition
26.09.2011
Two works from Luigi Nono's later period: moving musical evidence of a restless search in the absolutely unknown.
Released on sound carrier for the first time worldwide: the Risonanze erranti for low alto voice, piccolo or bass flute, trombone or tuba, six percussionists and live electronics. A masterpiece apostrophized as a “song cycle” in the aftermath, among other things, of the monumental “tragedy of hearing” Prometeo, for which Nono's artist friend, the philosopher and dedicatee Massiomo Cacciari had compiled the text corpus. There, between insular musical formations of urgency, there had still been the idea of real traces of a path-like network; in the risonanze erranti, however, there is no rigor of direction. What are actually composed are wandering, wandering resonances – in many ways contrasting sound events and vocal evocations in a sea of silence.
Despite occasional impulse attacks from the bongos or bloodcurdling, shrill piccolo fluttering tongues: the impression of the work, which lasts around forty minutes and is full of mythical echo chambers and time-lost listening, clearly has ritual traits. The echo of historical moments and the appearance of future signs stir in the electro-acoustically alienated space-time coordinates. Because Nono's late music listens above all to the front, to the open. Even if – as in the Risonanze erranti – it is darkly tinted. Because the work, whose fragmented song of misfortune and wasteland, of doubt and abyss is based on fragments of words from the poetry of Herman Melville and Ingeborg Bachmann, in whose structure tone seals from lamentations by Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin are borrowed, Nono was considered a winter journey "in my heart". Of course: a music that wanders in the horizon of existential questions looking for the new, the unheard of, can, no: must appear strange at first glance, perhaps even strange to some listeners. However, those who are up for the adventure - and the fantastic interpreters, as well as the virtuoso live electronic sound magicians of the SWR experimental studios, have succeeded under Detlef Heusinger in a recording full of presence and momentary magic, the paradox of a balance in the ground, sky and directionless - will have experiences that cannot leave you indifferent.
As already indicated in the title, the second recorded piece also has something to do with the relativity of temporality: Klaus Burger, an exceptional brass player, realized Nono's Post-prae-ludium n.1987 per Donau for bass tuba and live music, which premiered in Donaueschingen in 1. Electronics. Making music without a net and a false bottom; risk, risk, concentration of design; and successful, exhilarating immersion in a band of sound inside full of life.
Helmut Rohm
http://www.br-online.de/br-klassik/cd-tipps/cd-aktuell-klassik-cd-luigi-nono-ID1317129861719.xml
15.09.2011
The biggest project of Luigi Nono's last decade was the composition of Prometeo, the "tragedy for listening" first performed in 1984. In the pieces that followed, up to his death in 1990, Nono built on the new world of electro-acoustic possibilities he had opened up in that work, and of those, perhaps the most extraordinary is Risonanze Erranti for contralto, bass flute, tuba, percussionists and live electronics, which first appeared in 1987, though Nono continued to revise the score for each subsequent performance. It has remained the most elusive of the late works, and this meticulous recording is its first appearance on disc.
Based on texts by Herman Melville (from his civil war Battle Pieces) and Ingeborg Bachmann (her poem Kein Delikatessen), as well as quoting fragments from 14th- and 15th-century songs by Machaut, Josquin and Ockeghem, Risonanze Erranti is an almost frighteningly bleak and austere work, in which every word seems suspended in its own time and space, and interspersed with sounds conjured from flute, tuba and the electronic transformations that envelope them, punctuated by fierce percussion attacks. Also from 1987, Post-prae-ludium Donau is very obviously a splinter from the same creative block, placing a solo tuba at the center of a web of electronic refractions and echoes. Both works are strangely beautiful, mysterious and totally compelling.
Andrew Clements
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2011/sep/15/nono-risonanze-erranti-review
15.09.2011
ROOM MADE OF SOUND
The late work of Luigi Nono (+1992) is characterized by a microscopic look into the depths of sound. Such explorations were made possible by computer-assisted live electronic sound manipulations. The music on this CD was realized by the experimental studio of the SWR, with which Nono had already worked closely in the 1980s.
In the 1986/87 Risonanze erranti, which has now been recorded for the first time, Nono sets a low alto, a flute and tuba against an ensemble of five percussionists, with the basic colors remaining clearly identifiable throughout the entire piece. The "breathing sounds" of the voice and wind instruments, transformed by playing techniques and electronics, are often confronted with hard, rhythmically pointed interjections that set clear caesuras.
As is usually the case in Nono's late work, the texture is extremely rich in the exhaustion of timbres, while at the same time being very thinned out and fragmented. Individual sound events manifest themselves for a moment, floating in space, wandering around, making fleeting contact with other elements, only to fade away again into the stillness of space. An enigmatic balance ensures that this game of wandering resonances does not fall apart. Despite the relatively open architecture, an atmosphere of ritualistic severity is created that evokes associations with Asian theater, with the sounds appearing and disappearing like people.
This dramatic impression is supported by the expressiveness that Nono knows how to create by embedding violent outbursts of forte in sound events on the threshold of silence. He also integrates fragments of polyphonic Renaissance compositions into the music. These 'broken beauties' always provide the familiar rhetorical or gestural impression of lost bel canto worlds.
Post-prae-ludium per Donau, composed in 1987, seems much more abstract. Nono concentrates here on the tuba, whose electronic transformation is very extensive. It is not always possible to say with certainty whether it is instrumental or natural sounds or even human singing. From the volume and layering of the sound, Nono forms his own sound space that seems to listen into maritime depths or cosmic expanses. In the end, the music consumes itself in a mysterious spectral glow.
The interpretations by the Ensemble Experimental, Les Percussions de Strasbourg and the sound engineers of the SWR Experimental Studio are exemplary in their combination of expressive severity and sensual abstraction.
George Henkel
http://www.musikansich.de/review.php?id=10508
In March 2018 this article was published in which Dr. Hartmut Hein compares Andreas Skouras' recording of Kalevi Aho's piano works with that of Sonja Fräkis from 2014: https://magazin.klassik.com/reviews/reviews.cfm?TASK=REVIEW&RECID=32221&REID=17601
08/17
Kalevi Aho (b. 1949) is best known as the creator of orchestral works (16 symphonies!), his oeuvre for piano has remained comparatively small. Strange given the quality evident in Andreas Skouras' almost complete overview.
The weighty and the aphoristic are balanced here, also insofar as the important always sounds accessible and the "little things" can open up unexpected abysses. This is not least due to Skoura's interpretations, which are so differentiated in terms of sound and sensuality as well as rhythmically gripping. The three-movement "Sonata" (1980) and the "Solo II" (1985) demand everything that an advanced pianist can muster in terms of virtuosity and expressive creative ability. They vacillate between lyrical pause and propelling motor activity, present dazzling harmonic states of levitation and orchestral thinking in complex rhythms. The prestissimo of the sonata ends in violent cluster discharges, the expansive Tranquillo molto begins with quiet islands of sound and ends in Lisztian orchestral evocations.
The first recording of the somewhat old-fashioned "Halla" for violin and piano (1992), on the other hand, presents an elegiac, transfigured dialogue in nocturnal sound values.
Even the more modest pieces have it all: The “Three Small Piano Pieces” (1971) seem to pay homage to Shostakovich with their fleshed-out texture and sardonic nuances; the "Two Easy Piano Pieces for Children" (1983) hide bizarre outbursts of violence in a funny scherzo guise.
Also noteworthy are the "19 Preludes" (1965-68), which demonstrate the enormous talent of the then 16-year-old composer. Although the cycle is still clearly based on late romantic models, it contains extremely mature, expressive inspirations that can radiate deadly seriousness in "Grave".
Dirk Wieschollek
07 / 2017
[…] “Sonata” (1980) and “Solo” (1985) demand everything that an advanced pianist can muster in terms of virtuosity and expressive creative ability. The “Prestissimo” of the “Sonata” ends in violent cluster discharges, the expansive “Tranquillo molto” begins quietly and ends in Lisztian orchestral evocations. Even the more modest pieces have it all. [...] Andreas Skouras' interpretations are tonally differentiated and rhythmically gripping.
Dirk Wieschollek
07 / 2017
June 22.06.2017, XNUMX, SZ Extra
CD tip
Andreas Skouras begins his exciting CD, which contains the piano works of the renowned Finnish composer Kalevi Aho, born in 1949, with his most important and in every respect most demanding work, the "Sonata" from 1980. It sounds rich in contrast and colorful like a huge three-movement orchestral piece. It ends with early preludes by the 16 to 19 year olds, which offer a nice insight into the musician's development and are a good start for the listener. In between there is a fine Sonatina (1993), witty little pieces and "Halla" for violin and piano.
Klaus Kalchschmid