Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio have been probably the most vital Italian composers of the second half of the twentieth century and their very totally different achievements would all profit from the extraordinary focus of a BBC Symphony Orchestra Whole Immersion day. This 12 months Nono at the very least may need been given a day to himself to mark his centenary, however as a substitute all 4 composers have been bundled collectively below the title of Italian Radicals for 2 concert events, one given by college students from the Guildhall faculty, the opposite by the BBC Symphony Orchestra carried out by Martyn Brabbins.
At the least the one work by Nono on this quite meagre providing was one in every of his best large-scale items from the Nineteen Sixties, the Canti di Vita e d’Amore, composed in 1962. It’s a politically charged setting of three texts; the music is extremely wrought, the orchestral writing indignant and fiercely confrontational. At its coronary heart is the hovering, unaccompanied soprano setting of Djamila Boupacha, based mostly on a poem by a Spanish dissident, which was negotiated with seraphic ease by Anna Dennis, whereas the tenor John Findon took the lead within the final motion, Tu, to a poem by Cesare Pavese.
Brabbins had begun the BBCSO’s live performance with Dallapiccola’s Three Questions With Two Solutions, 5 quietly expressive miniatures from 1962, whereas Maderna’s ultimate work, his Oboe Concerto No 3, adopted the Nono; Nicholas Daniel was the excellent soloist, threading his oboe’s lyrical traces by means of the ever-changing orchestral tumult and unflinchingly assembly its excessive technical challenges. And there was extra excellent woodwind enjoying to start the second half, when the BBCSO’s bass clarinettist, Thomas Lessels, performed Berio’s solo Sequenza IXc as a prelude to his Sinfonia, which ended the live performance, with members of the BBC Singers taking the components initially written for the Swingle Singers. This was certainly a chance missed, for one in every of Berio’s much less usually heard large-scale items of the Nineteen Sixties, corresponding to Laborintus II or Epifanie, may need changed the now quite dated sounding Sinfonia, whose issues of steadiness between voices and devices nonetheless appear insoluble in dwell performances, regardless of Brabbins’ greatest efforts.
