Luigi Nono
Como Una Ola De Fuerza Y Luz

THE REVIEW

For Luigi Nono, music was inseparable from human and political commitment: an example of this is "Como una ola de fuerza y luz", a piece from 1971-72 dedicated to the revolutionary activist Luciano Cruz whom Nono had met in Santiago, Chile, and whose sudden death (attributed to a trivial domestic accident) inspired the creation of this piece. A highly complex piece, it includes a soprano voice, piano, orchestra, and magnetic tape, and lasts for half an hour. The piano is used only in the lower-middle register, from the center of the keyboard downwards, and in the studio, Nono transposes its sonorities even lower, recording them on tape. In a live performance, this thus creates, in the words of the composer, «a game of reflections, echoes, beats, and pulses» between the two pianos.

A splendid piece, the title describes it well: like a wave of strength and light. Vitality, aggression of sound, acoustic explosions alternate in this long composition in which a sharp female voice invokes "Luciano!", the name of the disappeared leader but "siempre vivo!"; the piano is almost a pretext to derive hammering and percussive sonorities, while the orchestra releases the harsh timbres of the percussion and brass. Added to this are spectral colors in the introduction and mid-section of the piece, piercing whistles near the end, and filamentous and alien sonorities that outline apocalyptic scenarios in the suggestive conclusion, laden with poetry.

With "...sofferte onde serene...", Nono turns his gaze to his private life and that of his friend Maurizio Pollini, for whom the piece was written in 1976. These waves are anguished because deaths had struck both Nono's family and that of Pollini during that period. The result is a piece for piano where once again there is a split between the instrument played live and its acoustic image elaborated on tape, which blend and resonate with each other. A piece that proceeds for 14 minutes almost completely nullifying any discursive logic, and important also because it marks the last time Nono uses magnetic tape: in subsequent years he would adopt the technique of live electronics, i.e., the real-time electroacoustic modification of sound.

The utopias of electronic music are well represented in "Contrappunto dialettico alla mente", a piece from the crucial year of 1968 in which Nono assembles an incandescent sound flow made of sounds and noises recorded at the Rialto market in Venice, bell and water sounds of the lagoon city, pure electronic sounds generated in the studio, plus four female voices and one male voice. The voices, which convulsively accompany the entire piece in its 20 minutes of duration, become intelligible only in the last part, for a harsh indictment of the United States involved at the time in the Vietnam War.

Thus, in three pieces, an important portrait of the Venetian composer and the visions that animated his life and his music.