Nono / Luz / Hirsch / Ensemble United Berlin - Polionica-Monodia-Ritmica Music CD

Collecting two 1950s-era works, one composition from the early 1960s, and a final, extended work from 1989, this CD brilliantly captures Luigi Nono's meditations on form, silence, and tone. Ensemble United Berlin's performance is aptly hushed throughout the early whispers of "Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica," and then the group grapples with the halts and drops and lurches as if it, too, saw the precipice Nono seemed to find on every side of him. Drums drop in and vanish, reeds dust the surface. "Canti per 13," too, incites the same dialogues, with silence, multiplicity, and timbral extremity; notes are played with singular gestures, their pointillism arresting the ear. Then Angelika Luz's soprano blasts through with "Canciones a Guiomar," streaking the air with quickened leaps and then molten lines that thread themselves from mere instrumental hints. The violin piece that closes the set is amazing for it's extreme registers and rushes of grated timbres, each of which-again-comes and goes in a flash (recalling the Arditti Quartet's fascinating string quartet recording and Irvine Arditti's La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura on Auvidis Montaigne). Nothing is fluid or uninterrupted in Nono's sound world, and this a great glimpse at the history of how he composed his interruptive works over several decades.