St John’s Smith Square, London
Alongside works by Morton Feldman, the experimental music festival centred on the Italian composer’s enigmatic pieces that blur instrumentation into electronics
Principal Sound is three days of concerts devoted to the music of the last half century. It takes its title from the only organ work composed by Morton Feldman, who was the featured composer at the first event two years ago. There was Feldman in this latest weekend of concerts too, but this time the focus of attention was the late music of Luigi Nono, the fragile, fragmented pieces he composed in the years up to his death in 1990.
Performances of those works, often involving electronics and exploring extended instrumental techniques, are still rare in the UK, but four of them were included during the weekend. There was … Sofferte onde Serene..., for piano and prerecorded sounds, with its remembrances of Venice’s bells of and the echoing emptiness of its lagoon, played with wonderful authority and assurance by Siwan Rhys, and A Pierre, Dell’azzurro Silenzio, Inquietum from members of the Explore Ensemble, a tribute to Boulez from 1985, in which electronics blur the edges of the sonorities of bass flute and contrabass clarinet. Most enigmatic of all was the last piece that Nono composed, “Hay Que Caminar” Soñando, for two violins (Clemens Merkel and Alissa Cheung from the Bozzini Quartet) dispersed around the auditorium and responding to each other in halting phrases or assertive outbursts.
by Andrew Clements via Electronic music | The Guardian
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