Al Gran Sole Carico D'Amore
Luigi Nono's Al gran sole (the full title, from a Rimbaud poem about a woman involved in the Paris Commune, means 'In the bright sun charged with love') is a drama without a narrative. Each of its two parts centres on a suppressed revolution: the Commune in 1871 and the Russian uprising of 1905. Each is described in a collage of texts from various sources: the Commune, for example, in eye-witness accounts, in Rimbaud's poem, in Brecht's play Die Tage der Commune, in a book by Marx and references to it by Lenin. The collage form also enables historical events to be compared with more recent ones; thus texts by Che Guevara and his companion Tania Bunke appear alongside those referring to the Commune and, in Part 2, Russia in 1905 is compared with troubled Turin in 1950 (accounts of a strike at Fiat, Cesare Pavese's beautiful poem about the prostitute Deola), and alongside the victims of the Tsarist regime we encounter Antonio Gramsci, Fidel Castro and women prisoners from South Vietnam.The music is about as un-operatic as can be, with several characters sung by quartets of singers, but it is often extremely dramatic. Scene 5 of Part 2, for example, begins with a choral 'motto' from Marx before passages of dialogue from Gorky's The Mother are intercut with accounts of Castro's revolution in Cuba. Several types of music are involved, all dissonant, all jagged, but the scene is unified by an intense (though harmonically dense) line of great eloquence that passes from voices to orchestra and back again. Several revolutionary songs are quoted, usually almost unrecognizably, though the Internationale throughout and Dubinushka in Part 2 are readily identifiable.It is a powerful work and a complex and difficult one, not only for the listener (Nono's high soprano lines would give the Queen of the Night a fit of the vapours). Even where curdled harmonies, simultaneously sung texts, steeply angular lines and violent exclamations from orchestra and pre-recorded tape are hindering comprehension of what is going on, there is never the slightest doubt of Nono's passionate honesty and his deep concern both to invent a new sort of music theatre and, far more important, to write about victims – often women – who heroically do not abandon their ideals. It seems almost impossible that anyone took the risk of a live recording of so hugely complex and demanding a piece, but the performance is itself heroic, and it is graphically recorded. Alas, however, despite two long and absorbing booklet essays about the work, Teldec prints the quadrilingual text without translation, thus assuming either that Nono didn't much care whether people understood his elaborately structured text or that everyone interested in this profoundly original work of music theatre is fluent in French, German, Italian and Spanish. But in fact la nave à guasta per due soldi di catrame ('the ship is spoiled for a ha'p'orth of tar').Michael Oliver--From International Record Review - subscribe now