Shut up you idiot.

Well, I made to both nights, and sat in two completely different places: Friday was the acoustically perfect centre, Saturday (for the benefit of leg room) over to the left in that first row of seats in the upper stalls.* And I can confirm that it is a different piece depending on where you are. Moreover, I rather preferred my asymmetrical Saturday night seat, which gave a greater sense of near and far to the whole thing.

There's talk of the pay-off being the ending, but for me the real highlight was Three Voices (a), which both times was absolutely staggering (and the first time a jaw-dropping shock). Perusing the 'listening text' afterwards with more care than I wanted to take beforehand I see that this is ostensibly the key scene in the drama - what was most surprising to me about the whole piece was how linear it actually is in its musical and narrative arcs - you are very definitely taken somewhere and brought back again. I'm not sure yet whether I like this or not: it worked dramatically, and I thought the pacing of it was particularly well-judged, in fact; but I'm held back by my preference for other, much less linear Nono pieces.

* Sorry I didn't catch up with you in the end Bryn - my 7-month-pregnant wife was having an uncomfortable day of it, and two hours of Nono was more than enough excitement for her!

I used to think that there had been a fairly clean stylistic break between "early" and "late" Nono, and, while Prometeo and the other works of the 1980s are predominantly quiet and static, there's actually a lot of that in the earlier pieces too, and in many ways the soundworlds aren't so different. What is different, of course, is that the passion (a grotesquely-debased word which I'm trying to invest here with the force it used to have before it could be applied to everything from airlines to biscuit manufacturers) with which the 1960s and early 1970s works are overbrimming has been replaced by a kind of resignation to inwardness. My own gloss on this used to be that this new introspection was just as radical in its way of opposing the tendency everwhere to treat audiences as if they had the attention-spans of insects; but now I'm not at all so sure.

The problem is that Nono's late work becomes palatable to whole constituencies of listeners (and scholars) for whom his previous commitment to socialist revolution was an "extra-musical" embarrassment. Whether Nono intended this or not, his work became much more easily assimilated into a concept of "greatness" which rejects such engagement as ephemeral if not completely wrong-headed.

However I don't think one has to be a socialist to respond to the passion of 1960s Nono any more than one has to be a Lutheran to respond to that of JS Bach. For me the assumption that his late work achieves a new beauty and profundity relative to what came before doesn't hold any water any more: it feels to me more like something important is missing, although what's left is still impressive.

That was true for me too and I see that Stuart M includes it as one of the most sublime sections for him as well. Whether this is related or not I don't know but I also felt that the two "Three Voices" sections, both (a) and (b), were the sections where the Promethean theme was most evident.

Stuart's comment about the "developing a level of sustained concentration that I thought I had lost the ability to achieve" struck a chord of fellow feeling in me too. I confess that my feeling beforehand was something like "You're probably only going to be able to hear this once in your lifetime. And you're probably going to blow it, aren't you, by thinking about other things, your mind wandering and failing to give it proper attention. I've known this before, you third rate person."

But, in fact, it wasn't like that at all. Sustained concentration came easily and naturally in ways which were just the opposite of the "bludgeoning you into submission by force of will" that some music seems to attempt (no names, otherwise I'll get into trouble). It was more as if that old enemy, lack of concentration and attention, was an obstacle that was lifted out of the way. I suppose that was part of (but only part of) what I meant about expecting the experience to resonate forwards  - it showed the way, by demonstrating how it could be done, towards a genuine change in ways of attentive listening. I hope that is something that will last. But at all times, and I think this is why I found it particularly powerful and admirable, it was tough, realistic, clear-eyed, packed with content and grounded in the physical actuality of sound.

[I hadn't seen Richard's last post when I tapped this out but, FWIW, I had put that last sentence in partly to head off the thought that, to my mind anyway, this was escapist or introverted music, still less (though I know Richard wasn't suggesting this) that it has anything in common at all with the 'mystical minimalist' cast of mind. I certainly didn't find it 'meditative' in that sense. It was much tougher stuff than that, IMHO, engaged with the real world (Three Voices (b) and the Second Stasimon?) . But I do speak as someone who isn't familiar at all with other Nono (something which I will now do something about) so, as ever, I'm happily jumping in without knowing what I am talking about .]

Wow - I wasn't aware of that. Did Nono articulate that defence in writing anywhere?

Yes, they do resist it, and they resist careless listening too, but my point (which is a personal one) is that something is missing - in his efforts to make something less topical and more "timeless" Nono has undermined the expressive potential his earlier work has. I happen to think that the extent to which music is an authentic response to its own circumstances (and here I would still class the St Matthew Passion and its rlationship to Lutheran ritual of its time with Nono's Contrappunto dialettico alla mente and its direct references to the Vietnam War) is reflected in its ability or not to speak clearly to other times and places. The idea of "timelessness" is a relatively new one in art and is to me a sign of disengagement and indeed "conservatism" (in the sense that the "conservative" artist is trying to claim that there is something about his/her art which has "lasting power" even though history shows that this is never possible to predict in one's own time), and, while in many senses of course Nono's late work is anything but conservative, to me this performance for the first time put the idea in my head that what I'd thought was moving on actually sounds more like giving up.

Quite right - and I think at least at the performance I was at there was a feeling of the audience collectively getting to grips with the piece's 'way of listening' during the first two or three movements. Interesting that even though one knows at the beginning that it is a 'Tragedy of Listening', a piece about listening, it is only through the process of continued concentration on the music that true listening is achieved - as if Nono is saying "No, not that kind of listening - this kind."

I think this realisation of a shift in one's listening technique contributes somewhat to the great power of Tre Voci (a) which begins with the words

"ascolta, cogli quest'attimo/balena un instante un batter [del] ciglio/un instante"
("listen, seize this moment/an instant flashes, a blink of an eye/an instant")

and ends with repeated injunctions to "listen". I found this to be a 'live' rationalisation of what I was experiencing and realising during the performance, and I finally understood (I think) the meaning of "Tragedy of Listening". The conjunction of argument, invocation and demonstration struck me as very persuasive.

Personally speaking, I'm not sure I can detect any traces of Nono's socialism in Prometeo, but then my radar for such things is not as sharp as that of other listeners. It isn't however the lack of obvious socialist messages that makes me feel the piece is 'great' (I also love Coma una ola de fuerza y luz  and Al gran sole carico d'amore) but the way it speaks to us as listeners, and creates a suitably mythic atmosphere (a sense of simultaneous distance and proximity to the sound material, the scale and pacing, and the text) while leaving its mythology open to interpretation.

And I don't really mind if that sounds mystical - I think 'mystical' is an unfairly maligned word!

I've just spent around 2 minutes reading the 'review' linked to there, GG. There are better ways of spending 2 minutes.