“Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar” – “Travellers, there are no roads, there’s only travelling”. This phrase, etched on a monastery wall in Toledo, inspired a number of the Italian avant-garde composer Luigi Nono’s final works, and it aptly captures something of his character. Though he was a colleague in the 1950s of Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen – he was even the person who coined the now-infamous term “Darmstadt School” – his music is not easily categorized. A member of the Communist Party from 1952, Nono strove to imbue his music with a political conscience not so explicit in the work of his serialist colleagues. He followed no conventional road in his own career. The fact that his music is hard to pigeonhole is perhaps one reason why Nono’s music is less often performed than some of his peers’, and the focus on his important work that this year’s Holland Festival provides is therefore very welcome.
Alongside an exhibition curated by the composer’s widow Nuria Schoenberg-Nono and a series of lunchtime concerts, three major events from 19–22 June this year will honour Nono, presenting several of his most important compositions in the remarkable Westergasfabriek Gashouder, a vast former gasholder in Amsterdam.
First to be performed, on 19 June, is his 1980s magnum opus Prometeo, widely considered a masterpiece, which was premièred thirty years ago by the late Claudio Abbado. This piece – a “tragedia dell’ascolto”, or tragedy for listening, in Nono’s words – uses texts by numerous writers through history concerning the story of Prometheus, the stealer of fire from the gods in Greek mythology. The Gashouder is the perfect setting, as the musicians and electronics can surround the audience, creating a surround effect as Nono originally desired.
On 22 June, the third day of Nono performances, two of Nono’s late works inspired by the Toledo etching likewise make use of the Gashouder’s shape: Caminantes… Ayacucho and No hay caminos, hay que caminar… Andrej Tarkovskij both space their performers out around the audience, encircling listeners in an ever-changing haze of sound. These pieces will be interspersed by music from the 16th century composer and fellow Venetian Giovanni Gabrieli, an early pioneer of spatially separated performance.