Spiritual Extrusion: Shouting at Tyrants

Abstract mourning sounds of Luigi Nuno and Armenian church music: Particular enthusiasm for the vocal ensemble Klangforum and Geghard.

Woe to the cold beasts! The beginning is a bit like fantasy, a bit like science fiction — and Klangforum Wien with Sylvain Cambreling knows exactly how it works: creatures that crawled and crawled out of narrow gaps, tiny, delicate, lively, followed by some kind of laser light. . . And soon it also seemed that the faint roar of a small thunderstorm that fell over the Kollegienkirche shortly after the start of the concert belonged to Luigi Nono’s electronic track “Guai ai gelidi Mostri”.

The state is “the coldest of cold beasts”: Nuno referred to this Nietzsche sentence in the title of his work, created in 1983 at the SWR experimental studio in Freiburg, the stronghold and furnace of new music. The first movement was titled “Into the Tyrant!” , i.e. with the ancient battle cry against persecution: the theme of Nuno’s life. The way he treats the text is no less than his late creative phase: as if Nietzsche “Zarathustra” was recorded on scrolls distributed in parts only, it takes individual words only to knead them as sound material in two vocals (Noa Frenkel and Elisa de Toffol) without regard, and electronically prepares them with instruments.