In his hundredth anniversary year, Luigi Nono is perhaps more often spoken about than performed. At the Konzerthaus Berlin, his 1972 work Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like a Wave of Strength and Light), paired with Mahler’s Fourth, reminded us of his importance. Scored for large orchestra, with roles for piano, soprano and tape, it is, as Joana Mallwitz emphasised in her pre-concert talk, “an extreme work”, coming together in massive tutti or falling away in sudden silences: a music of constant transformation, in which waves of sound rise and subside, constantly seething, yet held in check.
A lifelong Communist, Nono dedicated the piece to Chilean activist Luciano Cruz, who had died in mysterious circumstances, adding a setting of a poem by Cruz’s comrade, Julio Huasi. Soprano Sarah Aristidou expertly executed the high, melismatic lines, alternating with phrases shouted out in defiant appeal. Lament becomes call to arms, call to arms lament. The pianist must retain clarity of line even when thrown off by blurring effects of lower-register pedalling and echoing tape. Tamara Stefanovich’s articulated individual notes without sacrificing the part’s fundamental drama, while Mallwitz conducted with cool precision and poise.
“Luciano! Joven como la revolución” (Luciano! Young, like the revolution) declaims the soprano. But at this point in time, the revolution is no longer young. In Chile, the year after Como una ola premiered, the CIA helped depose the democratically-elected Salvador Allende, while today, Nono’s Italy is currently ruled by a far right government. But Nono’s music refuses defeatism. He saw death, “not as something that ends, but as something that transforms”, and the work is dedicated, in Spanish, “Luciano Cruz para vivir” (that Luciano Cruz may live). In the coda, the tape replays echoes of previous music. There is no final conclusion, for time leaps forward and back, like the revolution itself.
Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, wrote Theodor Adorno, “avoids all monumentality”. A relatively short work, it’s full, as Mallwitz commented, of “scurrilous, grotesque figures” alongside images of sweetness and piety. In the second movement, a solo violin, tuned to imitate a folk fiddle, evokes Freund Hein, a personification of death, leading us up to heaven in a dance. Concertmaster Suyoen Kim played it with aplomb, neither overly grotesque nor overly smooth. In the finale, the soprano soloist offers a child’s naïve image of Heaven. There’s something artificial to this paradise, its source, Brentano and von Armin’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn, having altered its folk sources in order to make them seem more “authentic”. The song is not – quite – placed in quotation marks, but it is troubled by shadows, most notably in the image of “the butcher Herod”, infamous for the Massacre of the Innocents, slaughtering animals for the heavenly feast. “There is no more music on earth,” repeats the singer as the work ends. Yet earth is where we hear this music. Consolation is, perhaps, the most dangerous thing of all, if it only acts as compensation for present suffering.
Aided by Mallwitz’s resolutely unsentimental approach, Aristidou balanced sweetness and irony, the voice’s final fading seemed rendered as anti-climax, symphonic scale falling away to powerless song. Throughout, Mallwitz’s rigour was refreshing in music that is today played so often as to risk seeming hackneyed. As Adorno notes, Mahler’s achievement lay in defamiliarising clichés, joining disparate and incongruous materials in a fragmentary whole. “Mahler’s humanity is a mass of the disinherited,” he writes. “He promises victory to the loser.” In the Fourth, music ‘from below’ brings high culture down from within. In this way, Mahler’s irony and Nono’s commitment reveal themselves as part of the same urge to transform society.
