DESCRIPTION:
This is one of the premier performances of a celebrated cantata by Luigi Nono. I upload this in honour of the recently passed passionately rigorous composer-radicalist and arts innovator , administrator and conductor, thinker and music theorist Pierre Boulez. A whole epoch of musical and to a certain degree intellectual and historical life of Europe is now gone. The century of great suffering and intense novelty. Until his death he had been the only alive person of the Darmstadt trio consisting of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luigi Nono and Boulez himself. These are the people that created first electronic music, these are the people that created among the earliest examples of such extreme forms of sonic expression as harsh industrial music as well as numerous inspirations for soundtrack composers (the list goes on and on). Furthermore, these people, through the language of serialism in particular, by attempting to control every single parameter of music, represented the strident move of political ideologies to total contol of its citizens. Thus, the Darmstadt trio has penetrated modern culture, even if mostly indirectly, to such an extend as to be seen as essential masters of sonic art. Il Canto Sospeso, is a rare example of sensual musical radicalism. It combines extreme expressionism of Webern's and Gesualdo's rich vocal artistiries and pushes it further to a new level of emotional expression. Similarly, the instrumental part, is deeply reminiscent of Webern's Symphonie op, 21 (especially the first movement), but much thicker and darker, consisting of big, cubic blocks of sound. This performance, is, in my humble opinion, the best of all. Boulez clearly felt and understood all nuances of this great musical monument precisely. This work also conveys the revolutinary spirit of the 20th century, romanticising, the horrible and the good of the time, with some paradoxically notaligic feeling of the better and brighter future.