Niccolò Castiglioni: Altisonanza - Le favole di Esopo

»The meadow is not only beautiful...«

Niccolò Castiglioni spent the last years of his life in the Dolomites. From Brixen, his hikes led him across meadows and streams into the solitude of the summit regions. He once explained to the musicologist Enzo Restagno at the sight of a blooming mountain pasture that this meadow was not only »beautiful«, it was also »good«. When he spoke of the dirt of the big cities, the native of Milan not only meant the noises that he kept away from his music.

The fast pace of the styles and ultimately their carefree coexistence also prevented him from searching for a music whose original purity he wanted to preserve. It is easy to imagine all of his works, from the freely interpreted serialism to the meticulously notated chaos structures of the Informel to the late, sometimes neotonal, often childishly simple compositions as composed mountain landscapes. They are messages from an untouched world, where stillness and clear air enhance perception.

Also the orchestral suite Altisonanza (High sound) breathes the thin air of the high mountains. It owes its unrivaled transparency to a pronounced penchant for high pitches. Castiglioni loved the wooden harshness of the highest piano register, the bright tinkling of small cymbals, the razor-sharp contours of a trumpet tone, the sound of children's voices, piccolos and woodblocks.

And he loved the sound of nature, the gurgling of a crystal-clear mountain stream like the flutes at the beginning of Altisonanza trace the harsh sounds of stones banging together and the voices of birds uncontaminated by any other sound. The orchestra is stretched out by three grand pianos, placed as far apart as possible, into a broad, often jagged soundscape.

Especially in the episodic Starter individual events draw attention to different places. Bird calls alternate with piano cascades, brass intervene with loud staccatos, and the strings intonate a simple song as if from afar. Only in the middle of the sentence does the action sink into the depths for a short time. The clear colors fade, which makes the distance to the headroom appear all the greater.

The short, solemn middle movement, a dark toned one, provides a similar symmetry in the overall composition Sarabande. Castiglioni creates a dreamy intermezzo against which the clarity of the final movement stands out all the more clearly. Into this world of sound, he writes, one should “immerse oneself and enjoy it like a crisp winter morning when one gets up early to wash one’s face with cold water.”

Perigordino, actually an old folk dance from the Périgord, describes a gradual awakening, perhaps even a creation story, »as if the universe of sounds was just being created and at this moment was hardly more than ten minutes old.«

In Castiglioni's late style, this search for the origins also includes a preference for the simple melody of children's and folk songs. They often shape entire works, here their fragments tell of the longing for distant times. Already at the beginning of the politically turbulent XNUMXs, Castiglioni had no illusions about an art that would be able to trigger social changes.

He also no longer believed in progress, which he laconically commented on: »The tone of the avant-garde had calmed down, which allowed me to compose with less fanaticism and more order«. His contemporaries were suspicious of the change. With partly neotonal compositions, a commitment to simple piety and childlike simplicity, Castiglioni maneuvered himself off the scene.

Even in Milan, where he has taught composition since 1977, his works have only rarely been performed. Her simplicity was misunderstood as naivety, and regression was suspected behind the search for childlike innocence. In fact, it was and is easy to label this music as naïve and perhaps even infantile art. Even Castiglioni, when he wanted to explain his compositions to the students, took a piece of white paper and drew a small house on it with just a few strokes. His handwriting, too, according to companions, had become more and more childish as he got older.

The simple wisdom of Aesop's fables also fits into this worldview. The Oratory The stories of Aesop is - without narrator and soloists - designed as an alternation of choral and orchestral movements. The four animal fables and an episode about Hercules and Pluto are framed by prologue and epilogue paying tribute to the Greek poet Aesop. There is a clear stylistic division between the worlds of animals, humans and gods.

While the language of men and gods touches the limits of tonality, Castiglioni uses the means of contemporary music to describe the animal stories. He transforms the humorous moral fables into a disguised opera buffa. For example, in the pointed answer of the wasp, which in the first fable is pointed out scornfully by a butterfly about its low past, not only does its aggressive humming sound, but one even thinks one hears the sting.

Castiglioni also finds a buffonesque equivalent for the dumb donkey from the second fable in the low trombones and the unison male voices. The world of gods and men, on the other hand, sounds sublime and sacred, with the ringing of bells and a cappella singing, right through to the »gloriam« of the final chorus, which celebrates the rise of the Greek slave to a poet of genius over a soundscape of twelve violins divided into two. Aesop was a hero in Castiglioni's sense, an artist who - like himself - never went into pathos and sought the truth in small, simple stories.

Martina Seeber

B.R. Classic
01.09.2014

Castiglioni later combined “Perigordino” with the two pieces “Entrée” and “Sarabande” to form the orchestral triptych “Altisonanza”, which it concludes. A look at the score shows how ingeniously Castiglioni dealt with the timbres. In the corner sections, the high registers and bright timbres dominate again, which is reinforced in "Perigordino" by the fact that low and middle strings are missing and only 24 violins are used. The movement is loosened up like chamber music, with figures resembling birdcalls repeatedly heard in the wind instruments. They form small concertini in threes, a long solo of the celesta can also be heard and – as an extravagance beyond compare – a solo of the triangle. Towards the end, all instruments unite successively in a long crescendo, and then the piece ends with a glaringly bright, rhythmic tutti sound in triple forte.
In "Perigordino" as in many other works of his late phase, Castiglioni opens the door to a magical world of sounds that has hardly ever been composed in such intensity and purity. The utopian desire to go back to the springs and plunge into their clear, cool waters, the desire to capture the sounds of pristine nature, and the serene gratitude at its beauties - all these pantheistically tinged sentiments and thoughts took on convincing form in Castiglioni's late works . For a long time he received little response - he was too non-conformist, and where others only lectured on the material, he showed human feelings and religious feelings. And that kind of thing just didn't fit the trend. This slowly changed after his death in 1996. György Ligeti, his colleague from Darmstadt who was nine years his senior, later stated:
“He had a wonderful, naïve and eccentric character and his music has been very neglected. It's really sad that he died before me. I would do anything to ensure good performances of his music anywhere in the world."
And Claudio Abbado, who was almost the same age and studied with him in Milan, paid tribute to him in warm words: "I have fond memories of an extremely reserved person, distinguished by an outstanding, very special intelligence that made him appear unique."
Meanwhile, the discovery of his much underperformed music is progressing. In 2005, Ricordi Verlag published an informative publication on the composer, and in 2012 the Milano Musica Festival presented a representative selection of his works in its major Castiglioni retrospective. A lot is also happening north of the Alps. The present recording of "Perigordino" was made at WDR Cologne, and with conductors such as Arturo Tamayo, Tito Ceccherini or Emilio Pomàrico, who can still be heard here with the first piece from the triptych "Altisonanza", Castiglioni's music found advocates, that will not let them be forgotten. It won't lose its natural freshness anytime soon anyway.

Max Nyffeler

09/2011

14.07.2011

Niccolò Castiglioni (1932-1996) was part of the post-war generation of Italian composers dominated by Berio, Maderna and Nono. As with his contemporaries, he had to accommodate the doctrines of postwar serialism and did so in a way that produced wonderfully refined music that retained the ability to charm and entertain.

Those qualities are obvious in this pair of large-scale works. From the 1970s onwards, Castiglioni pared down his music, simplifying the textures and making the gestures more direct. The oratorio Le Favole di Esopo, from 1979, intersperses five choral tellings of Aesop's fables with instrumental sinfonias illustrating the tales. It's a simple structure, realized in precise musical imagery.

Similarly, Altisonanza, from 1992, is full of crisp, clear sounds, crystalline textures, trickling figuration and echoes of birdsong, presenting a three-movement impression of the Dolomites where Castiglioni lived at the end of his life. It's all invigorating music that never wastes a note.

Andrew Clements

www.guardian.co.uk