Sospeso's violinist Mark Menzies performs Luigi Nono's late masterpiece, La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura, on the April 5 concert.

The Italian composer Luigi Nono was born in Venice in 1924 and died there in 1990. He studied with Gian-Francesco Malipiero and completed his education with the conductor and composer Bruno Maderna; Maderna was to be a close friend for the rest of his life.

Nono’s first works, written between 1950 and 1953, are pointillistic, but the profound concentration of expression transcends the limitations of this style. Compositions including Polifonica-Monodica-Ritmica (1951), Epitaph auf Federico Garcia Lorca (1952-1953), La victoire de Guernica (1954), and Liebeslied (1954), dedicated to his wife Nuria (the daughter of Arnold Schoenberg), date from this first period.

Incontri, for twenty-four instruments (1955), marks the composer’s principal confrontation with serialism. In the following years, Nono’s works tend to be characterized by a unity of sound (rather than the constant, analytic separation of parameters found in his serial colleagues like Stockhausen and Boulez); indeed, the composer seemed to feel this was the only possible approach to an art that, for Nono, was essentially lyrical (Il Canto Sospeso, 1955-56; Le Cori di Didone, 1958). At the beginning of the sixties, Nono turned towards politics (Diario polacco, 1958; the opera Intolleranza, 1960) and became fascinated with electronic sounds. The concurrent political engagement and technological experimentation created a symbiosis that produced several electronic or semi-electronic works (including La fabbrica illuminata, 1964; Ricorda cosa ti hanno fatto ad Auschwitz, 1966; and Non consumiamo Marx, 1969). These works show a composer strongly attracted to a notion of acoustic space and to new, perhaps idealized forms of listening.

Nono put his research on the acoustical properties of sound to work in his compositions of the seventies: the unforgettable Como una ola de fuerza y luz for soprano, piano, orchestra, and electronic tape (1971-1972); ...sofferte onde serene... a kind of piano sonata with electronic tape (1974-1977) written for his friend Maurizio Pollini; and especially Al gran sole carico d'amore (1972-1975).

The eighties began with a masterpiece, the string quartet Fragmente—Stille, An Diotima, a striking example of Nono’s new conception of composition. This is a difficult, esoteric work, demanding a new way of listening: an almost meditative concentration on the interior of sounds, rather than on their relationships. Throughout the course of the decade, Nono worked in the electronic studios of the Südwestfunk in Freiburg, and came to attach increasing importance to the roles of electroacoustic instruments that could transform sound over time.

From the eighties date Diario polacco n° 2 (1982), Guai ai gelidi mostri (1983), and Omaggio a Kurtág (1983), as well as the opera Prometeo (premiered in Venice in 1984), an opera that in many ways synthesizes the techniques of Nono’s late period. Among Nono’s final works are Caminates…Ayacucho, for contralto, flute, choirs, orchestra, and live electronics (1986-1987); No hay caminos, hay que caminar… Andrei Tarkovski, for seven instrumental groups (1987); and La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura, for violin, live electronics, and tape (1988).