Cheap Choral Works (Music) (Nono, Huber, Swr Vokalensemble Stuttgart) Price

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Customer Reviews of Choral Works

Great performances of important choral music
This disc contains two short choral pieces from the middle of Nono's career and a longer one from the end. Cori di Didone, a setting of love poetry for choir and percussion, dates from 1958 while Da un diario italiano, for 72 solo voices, is a complex setting of texts from the Italian resistance written in the mid 1960s. In contrast to these intense pieces, Das atmende Klarsein, for small choir, bass flute and electronics, is a study for Nono's opera Prometeo, written in the early 1980s.

Cori di Didone continues from where the last movement of his first masterpiece, Il Canto sospeso, left off. Complex yet clear choral writing--often containing open fourths and fifths, a precursor of his late work--floats over sometimes-aggressive percussion work. This is a touching miniature, though not amongst Nono's most important works.

Rather more musically cluttered is Da un diario italiano. The composer evidently was never truly satisfied with this work, as he returned to it several times without ever producing a definitive score, and indeed this is the first recording of the work. Its complex vocal counterpoint--and explicit political content--point towards a the style that created the masterpieces of the 1970s, Como una ola de fuerza y luz and Al gran carico sole d'amore. However, the later works are more finished, less congested, the style more refined and effective.

I have no such complaints about the final work, Das atmende Klarsein. A set of calls and responses for small choir against electronically-modified bass flute, this predominantly peaceful work glows with the radiant sounds of open fifths and fourths. Some of the choral writing, in particular, is astonishingly beautiful, the style very much pointing towards the opera Prometeo--but in a much more concise 37 minutes as opposed to 137 for the opera.

The performances here are outstanding, under the direction of the experienced German conductor Rupert Huber. The coordination in the difficult Da un diario italiano is phenomenal, yet the luminous sound of Das atmende Klarsein is just as impressive. However, there is a rival Das atmende Klarsein on the market, a live performance also directed by Huber. Its coupling is somewhat weightier, the piano-and-tape piece ...sofferte onde serene..... and the percussion and electronics sextet Con Luigi Dallapiccola. I have not heard the rival recording, so cannot compare performances, but I believe that nobody buying the present disc will be disappointed.

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Not very serious.
Once you die, your compositions can be used to say what you have not said when you were alive. It's not serious to record and sell a piece that Nono had not premiered during his life. The publisher has not the right to make money with "Da un diario italiano", composed in 1963/1964, 26 years before Nono's death. The performances are not marvelous. And the booklet is full of missprints: "Scabia Giuliano" instead of "Giuliano Scabia", "fianto" instead of "flauto", "Archivi Luigi Kani" instead of "Archivio Luigi Nono", and so on. The cover says that the pieces are sang by the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart under Rupert Huber, but omits the WDR Rundfunkchor Köln, that, according to the third page of the booklet, is the performer of two out of three tracks. Coherently, the booklet does not mention who conducts these pieces or who plays the percussion, but informs us about who has prepared the WDR choir.

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Groundbreaking Choral Work
Nono is the most human and engaging of the serialist set from Darmstadt. And his work for choral forces is unequalled, certainly among the serialists. He predated the vocal experiments of Ligeti and Berio by several years. This disc is a great sampling of early, middle and late period Nono.

The first work on the disc is for choir and percussion. The music takes it's direction from Nono's seminal work, Il Canto Sospeso. The voices are treated as almost solo instruments, and the words of the text are treated serially along with other elements of the music. The result is a stunning wash of sound that can sound like a precusor to Ligeti's Requiem of 5 years later. The text is unusual for Nono at this time. It focuses on romantic love rather than his more typical political material, but the style clearly leads in the direction of his first great theater piece, Intollerenza.

Nono's musical styles actually can be said to be summed up by his big theater works. The second choral work on this disc actually began as a study for a theater piece that never was developed, but you can hear in Da un Diario Italiano the spectacular vocal writing that would make Al gran sole carico d'amore such a shattering theatrical experience ten years later. The Diario is scored for 72 solo vocalists, but, unlike Penderecki's massed sounds, this work requires extreme precision in each of the parts, making it nearly impossible to find a performance. As such the work languished for years until this recording. And this performance reveals what a stunning piece this is. Based on collected texts from common Italians reacting to floods and uprisings, the piece has the deep humanism and love for people that characterized Nono's music in this period.

The final work on the CD, Das Atmende Klarsein is one of Nono's first and finest works in his late style, and contains seeds that would flourish in the theatrical work Prometeo. This piece is post-serialist...neither tonal nor atonal. Nono is interesting in sonority here, specifically the sound of fifths. The work is basically monodic, with thickening of textures occuring at points in the choral writing. We are worlds away from the density of Diario here. The sole accompaniment to the choir is a bass flute which is processed with live electronics. The flute is relegated to interludes which comment on the previous section and provide contrast. The overall feeling of this work is contemplative...almost otherworldly. I don't know quite what was driving Nono personally duringthis period, but the break in style is so profound, it is almost as if he has become another composer...just as moving as the earlier work, but altogether different.

Performances are superb, particularly in the Diario, which I imagine may be one of the most difficult choral works ever composed (and don't let anyone fool you....if someone sang wrong notes, it would be noticable in this music! That's an old slander against the avant-garde that is simply not true.) This is a highly recommended disc, one that I will come back too often.