Luigi Nono's string quartet Fragmente-Stille, an Diotima is in many ways about silence and introversion. The act of listening is heightened by the music's many long fermatas and silences, and by the many hushed but precisely shaded colors and timbres. Meanwhile, fragments of text by Hölderlin are meant to be read silently by the performers only. Amidst the quiet and contemplation, though, we find in rehearsal that there is a multitude of concrete details of sound and ensemble to be figured out! Intricate rhythms that combine and interlock amidst tempos that shift constantly, sometimes even a few times within a measure. Phrases that are shaped in rhythmic unison, pitches and colors that blend and match. Nono's distinctive, dark and energetic scrawl on the manuscript facsimile pages presents thickets of fermatas of varying lengths, tempo markings, tremolos, dynamics ranging from pppp to fff, extensive bowing instructions in Italian, Hölderlin text fragments in German...Lots of information, all distilled in performance into precise yet rough sounds, synchronized gestures and a string of poetic fragments provoking individual streams of thought.
It will be thrilling when all this contained introspection and the eerie metallic sound of this piece explodes after intermission into Schoenberg's Ode to Napoleon, in which Lord Byron's text will boldly issue forth in the voice of Paula Robison, and we will fill the hall right from the start of the piece with rich, resonant harmonies, erupting energy and swaggering long phrases. Come and hear this great program and experience as the balance swerves between words and music, thought and expression!
Fuller program note on the Nono here: http://www.mirandacuckson.com/2012/02/27/ci-concert-march-4-nonos-string-quartet-and-schoenberg/
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