sambeckett
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« on: 23:12:38, 25-04-2008 » |
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Hello All,
I haven't posted on here for a while, but...
I have 2 tickets to see Prometeo on the 9th May, but (really) unfortunately can't go.
I'd like to give them away rather than let the seats go to waste.
They're both concession tickets so I think you would need to be either a student, under 16 or over 65 to use them, but if anyone wants them, or knows anyone else who might, please send me a personal message and I'd be happy to post them to you.
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What's empirical about sound? You can't write an article about it in die Reihe, that's for sure.
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #1 on: 11:17:30, 26-04-2008 » |
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We would be interested if it were Fauré, but Nono is a no-no we regret to say.
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Bryn
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« Reply #4 on: 16:11:14, 07-05-2008 » |
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So, who else is going to the Saturday performance? I know Aaron is, and I am, but surely there must be others here?
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...trj...
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« Reply #5 on: 16:13:29, 07-05-2008 » |
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I am!
I didn't know Aaron was - hope to have a chance to meet you there in that case.
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Bryn
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« Reply #6 on: 16:28:45, 07-05-2008 » |
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I can't get there until around 5pm. Quite a handy place to browse and initially meet up might be the MDC shop beneath the main doors. The 5 for £20 section, perhaps, if it's still like that on Saturday?
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...trj...
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« Reply #7 on: 22:53:34, 07-05-2008 » |
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Don't know if I can be there as early as 5pm, Bryn, but I'll certainly be there to hear Chris Fox's talk and I'll see you at that if not before. Actually, I've just been offered a press ticket for Friday too, so lucky old me is going to see it twice.  |
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George Garnett
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« Reply #8 on: 19:04:03, 10-05-2008 » |
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I'm pretty much a newcomer to Nono and really can't formulate anything worthwhile to say about the experience last night. I can only report subjectively that, as far as I can tell a mere 24 hours on, it is one of those big events in my short allocation of consciousness that is going to resonate forwards and backwards from now on.
[Hmm. I've deleted the rest of what I had tapped out but even the bit that's left looks awkwardly tacky. Can't think how else to put it though.]
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« Last Edit: 20:38:45, 10-05-2008 by George Garnett »
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richard barrett
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« Reply #9 on: 22:42:48, 10-05-2008 » |
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That's exactly what I thought I'd feel, George, but I think I set my expectations too high. Firstly I must say it would be hard to imagine the performance being improved upon: the singers and instrumentalists were all superb, the technological elements were realised so perfectly that there was no sense of music for performers "and electronics", and I thought Nono's vision suffused the space with almost tear-inducing clarity. I was full of admiration for the way this music creates its drama the hard way, juxtaposing in subtly new constellations always the same sounds, harmonies and gestures, creating a sense of timing all its own which one must either submit to or find completely incomprehensible.
But.
In the end I found myself hankering after something more, something rougher, more immediate, for example Nono's own works of the 1960s, or for that matter the "notes inégales" music of the previous evening, where there was always the risk of things falling apart and, if this happened, the collective energy and imagination to find a new way of bringing the music back on course. Prometeo was for me I think too perfect, too self-contained and under control. As I said I was expecting some kind of revelatory experience, and in a way it was, but not as I thought - I was expecting to be somehow "inside" the music and found myself instead somehow distant from it.
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Bryn
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« Reply #10 on: 00:20:14, 11-05-2008 » |
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Well, I'm a day behind you Richard, for both 'events'. Worlds apart, even if some of the Tuba techniques overlapped somewhat.  Miles Davis has always been on the periphery for me, but last night (Friday, that is) was a joyously wonderful experience. Full marks all round. Tonight, although I have listened to the Col Legno SACDs, was for me a more interactive experience than the "notes inégales" concert. I nearly did not make it tonight. I had already boarded the 15:35 Greenline bus from Windsor to Victoria when I suddenly realised I had left my Prometeo ticket at home! Luckily I knew the driver and was able to get him to drop me off at the next traffic lights and I was able to get a bus back home with just enough time to get a train that got me to Waterloo by 18:05. I got to the RFH just in time for the 18:15 pre-concert event, (might comment on that later), and was incredibly fortunate o get just about the most acoustically central seat in the house. I'm too shattered by the rushing about and the musical experience to comment further tonight, but I have a feeling that it may be your misjudged expectations (not necessarily set too high, but possibly a lateral displacement?),which were the problem, Richard, rather than Prometeo as such. |
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« Last Edit: 00:47:01, 11-05-2008 by Bryn »
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George Garnett
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« Reply #11 on: 00:39:26, 11-05-2008 » |
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I was in the position of not really knowing what to expect other than what I had read in the programme and a few other things on the web. On the point about perfection, you have answered one question I had, Richard, about whether the glasses had always performed, or had been mixed in, quite as they they were meant to. I assume the answer is yes they did. The singers in particular I thought, were just phenomenal.
One aspect I hadn't picked up on until the performance itself was that every sound (I think?) in the whole two and a quarter hours was made on the basis of sustaining instruments or sustaining sung or spoken voices. There was no percussion, no keyboards of any sort (or even pizzicato strings? though I wasn't consciously checking for that). That somehow seemed to relate quite importantly to the ability to sustain hugely long temporal arches of sound apparently without any need for scaffolding and it also seemed to be connected to the strange recalibration/suspending/dissolving of time itself that seemed to be happening, though goodness knows how. And all this while being fully grounded in the physical reality of sound without any taint of anything 'mystical'.
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« Last Edit: 00:41:25, 11-05-2008 by George Garnett »
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Ian Pace
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« Reply #12 on: 02:00:03, 11-05-2008 » |
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I wasn't able to make either of these concerts, being otherwise engaged, but I do know the work, and have heard it live in a performance in Brussels in 1997 (together with a strange production by Robert Wilson, which was interesting in its own right, but whose relationship to Nono is anyone's guess). There's some extremely beautiful music in it, but I'm not wholly convinced about Nono's sense of proportion here. This is not a criticism of the fact of using long, slowly developing/transforming swathes of sonority, which obviously do not provide the sort of dramatic interplay that might be found in some other music (including some of Nono's own earlier work) - and other composers such as Feldman (including in such works as Coptic Light or For Samuel Beckett) and Radulescu, seem to manage such things over long time-stretches, at least to my ears - but simply a feeling that his ear for the very potential of certain material, in terms of its extension/expansion, might not be so acute. Some others can deliberately extend material significantly beyond what seem to be its 'natural' implications (N.A. Huber and Volker Heyn are good at this) so as to create a certain sense of defamiliarisation, but that doesn't seem to be what's at stake in Prometeo. This is not to want to diss the work, just perhaps sound an inkling of scepticism towards the quasi-sacred status it has attained in some quarters (not least in Germany, where Nono's almost divine status seems to preclude a reasonable and critical attitude towards his late period music).
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'These acts of keeping politics out of music, however, do not prevent musicology from being a political act . . .they assure that every apolitical act assumes a greater political immediacy' - Philip Bohlman, 'Musicology as a Political Act'
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richard barrett
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« Reply #13 on: 10:36:27, 11-05-2008 » |
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it may be your misjudged expectations I completely agree. The thought going through my head (not without a certain sadness) through most of the first half was "maybe I just don't like this kind of thing any more". |
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Sydney Grew
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« Reply #14 on: 10:57:17, 11-05-2008 » |
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The thought going through my head (not without a certain sadness) through most of the first half was "maybe I just don't like this kind of thing any more". Precisely. The same thought went through our own head some years ago. At that time having applied all necessary tests we determined that Nono was among composers a sixth-rater on an absolute scale of seven. It seems to have taken Mr. Barrett a little longer that is all. |
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