venerdì 31 agosto 2012

Review of Bruno Maderna, Liriche - Y Despues - Concerti, Stradivarius 2002


Maderna

Italian Translation

"This city is so beautiful and I know I will succumb to its charm,and I will become lazy" Corto Maltese.

Continuity in art is the enemy of opportunity, the man is not a perfect creature and in his dialectic with spasmodic search for perfection, which is an inexhaustible source of new creative energies, he must always be careful to balance this way, calcolate his energy’s drops, try to develop them as functional leaps inside a well-calibrated unity. This is the reason why artists that leave few signs of themself walks with an enigmatic aura around them, expecially when those signals are something special.
If a man who was born in Chioggia, closer to Venice and decided to end its human and artistic parable dying in Darmstadt, symbol of avantgarde and experimentation in the Fifties, where you coul meet Boulez, Pousseur, Berio, Nono, Stockhausen, Cage, Messiaen and instrumentalists as Gazzelloni, Tudor, Caskel, this man must have been something really special himself and must have given something special to those who have been lucky enough to get closet to him. Maderna had arrived in Darmstadt in 1951 in the wake of his great fame of orchestra’s conductor, fame that accompanied him throughout his career and would, some times, obscured and even placed in suborder his composer’s status.
In a few time he had been able to gain the trust of Dr. Strinecke, the organizer of those days of music, who invited him all the years and gave him the task of founding the famous Kammer-Ensemble.
Since he was a child, Maderna got the uncomfortable role of enfánt prodige, his aptitude for music was obvious, and in the absence of a protective family, he risked to become a circus phenomenon.
Thanks to the patronage of Mrs. Manfredi, a rich woman of culture, Maderna got the opportunties to make studies adequate to support his talent and, after the Conservative drawbench (Milan, Venice, Rome) to meet Malipiero and Scherchen , to study with them in the forties (despite the discomfort of a war parentheses lived in first person: the war of Russia, the Resistance, the prisoner’s camp).
During the post-war years Maderna consolidated a fruitful relationship with Luigi Nono Luciano Berio, with whom he founded in 1955 the Studio di Fonologia della Rai in Milan.
His image and his work, overwhelmed in the eighties by the mounting tide of neotonalism and neoromanticism, are far away from been relocated in their rightful place. Darmstadt and his school shall be questionable symbols, but not all his works are aprioristic condemnable and it’s undoubtedly true that the musicological research that has made some substantial step about him and his compositional modules, but what really matters about an author is how much of his music you can listen to.
So we can only welcome this recording of the italian Stradivarius label which represented a little-known but very interesting repertoire: there are the Verlaine’s Lirics , the Concerto for piano and the Concerto for oboe No.2 performed by Symphony Orchestra "G. Verdi" of Milan conducted by Maestro Sandro Gorli and his only work for guitar: Y Después for 10 strings guitar, dedicated to the guitarist Narciso Yepes and here performed by the excellent Elena Càsoli, and on this track I focus my attention because the Blog’s nature.
As I said, Y Después remains his only work devoted to guitar solo, a journey through Narciso Yepes, the ten strings guitar, Spain, Andalusia, the poem by Garcia Lorca, to meet the strength of primordial cante jondo. Y Después sings the streets of the Andalusian’s music, the gypsy people, here Maderna meets the gestures of flamenco’s guitar, the rasgueodos, her quick and aggressive notes, accents and rhythms, but above all he finds a pure monodic, original sound.
Using the grave strings non like simple fixed notes, but like the other six strings of the guitar, Maderna builds on the keyboard of this instrument complex arrangements and harmonies, dark sounds and clusters ever heard from a guitar. Maderna’s music is not easy listening, it shows special and original sounds that may appear like alien and unknown things, but they could awaken more then a conscience, lazy is the listener of our times and we know that at the end, as concluded by a melancholy Corto Maltese on background of the beautiful San Marco Square "Venice should be my end".

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