Maderna: Orchestral Works

On this CD:

1. Ausstrahlung, for mezzo-soprano, flute, oboe, tape recorder & orchestra
Composed by Bruno Maderna
Performed by SWF Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden with Pietro Borgonovo, Claudia Eder, Roberto Fabbriciani
Conducted by Arturo Tamayo

2. Concerto for oboe & orchestra, No 2
Composed by Bruno Maderna
Performed by Lothar Faber
Conducted by Bruno Maderna

3. Giardino religioso, for small orchestra
Composed by Bruno Maderna
Performed by Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra
Conducted by Hans Zender

Customer Reviews:

modernist lyricism.......2005-03-01

Maderna was a well-loved, respected creator composer conductor.Boulez's orchestral "Rituel" is dedicated to his memory.
He initiated, instigated much in the early years in Italy,the cultural backward freeze in contemporary expression around Venice then Milan, founding with Luciano Berio, Italy's first electronic music studio.
He followed the paradigm of Boulez, that the avant-garde needs more conductors not so many composers for there are too many of those. So slowly Maderna conducted all the new repertoire first at Darmstadt Summer courses,then in Italy and Germany,finally the USA,giving conducting courses at Tanglewood. Simultaneously he kept pace with composition never allowing the current issues in music to leave his pen.After an early period of elegant post-Webern-like gesturings He found the concept of the "indeterminate" to leave passages within a piece free, or to cue entrances of the musicians. He found this difficult and really never came to a fulfilling resolution to this paradigm,while others as his friends Boulez and Nono utilized live electronics and the computer with technicians. Still he left impressive works as within his final years late Seventies the orchestral "Aura", and "Quadrivium".Also here his "Giardino Religioso" where the conductor cues entrances,and joins the orchestra to play, and where tones, intervals are inscribed within boxes and brackets allowing the musician the freedom to begin wherever he-she may want. The trouble in retrospect is that most orchestral musicians(up to today;s scene I'd say) crave no such performative freedom(s) and would rather the struggling composer to simply tell them what to play.

Maderna wrote numerous Concerti for Oboe,(some incomplete) ones also for English Horn,as well as numerous fascinating unaccompanied pieces for Lothar Faber. In fact this collaboration finds no equal in the number of works produced. Maderna has always had a fine sense of lyricism even within the many times coldly abstract procedures of dodecaphonic music, I beleive it was Luigi Dallapiccola, who taught this first generation in Italy that 12 Tone Music needn't be ugly brutal, overwhelming or hopeless sounding or obtuse,something Paul Virilio has said of the post-war avant-garde that you still sensed the brutality of the Second World War, that not all the wood splinters of fragmented bricks had landed;Maderna I suspect thought something else should be there and the 12 Tones can be,should be garnered into shaped beautiful lines, and this is what Maderna does here in this beautiful Oboe Concerto, He loved the threadbare,moments of clarity and sparceness, he was always looking for where the "lightness" inhabited its places and realms within a piece of music, very Italian, if not Mediterranean.

A worthy revival of music by an unjustly neglected master.......2004-01-10

This disc, one of Col Legno's Collage series devoted to live performances of contemporary music, revives the music of the Italian composer-conductor Bruno Maderna (1920-1973), one of the forgotten men of the Darmstadt school of modernism. Given the high regard in which Maderna's contemporaries held him--both Boulez and Ligeti considered him something of a father-figure--the almost total neglect of his music is somewhat puzzling, and, as this disc shows, it is also unrelated to the quality of his output.

At just over half an hour, the longest work on this disc is Ausstrahlung, written in 1971, and a setting of Persian poetry (both in translation and in the original Persian) for mezzo-soprano, flute, oboe, orchestra and a tape collage of readings by the composer's daughters. I found the tape part rather distracting at times, which is a shame as the live music is very fine. The writing for the solo instruments is particularly lyrical, and it is often counterpointed by delicate traceries of sound from the orchestra. (Though the orchestral writing is often of a chamber-like transparency, at several points it becomes denser as the music swells towards almost Bergian climaxes.)

The First Oboe Concerto (and not the Second as the track listing here currently suggests) is a short (sixteen minutes) piece where the soloist is accompanied by a small chamber orchestra. Completed in 1963, this is a primarily lyrical piece where the oboe's near-constant melodic writing is accompanied by a delicate, fine-drawn accompaniment.

Giardino religioso, written for the 1972 Tanglewood Festival, takes delicacy of writing even further than in the concerto. This fifteen-minute piece is a veritable forest of tiny motifs and details, and I found it quite captivating. The work itself is partially aleatoric: through-composed sections alternate with ones where the instruments play independently in the manner of Lutoslawski, but Maderna goes further than his Polish counterpart by allowing some liberties in the order in which sections can be played.

This is a fine commemoration of an underrated composer. On the strength of these works (and others I've heard) Maderna had much in common with the other Darmstadt composers, though his own style blended their hard-edged atonality with a distinctly Italianate lyricism. One might criticise Ausstrahlung for sounding a little dated at times, but the other two works are exceptionally fine, and the performances are very good (though the sound is not perfect in the Oboe Concerto, it shouldn't detract from the listener's appreciation of this delightful work).

Gaetano Giani-Luporini: Selected Works
Average customer rating:
Gaetano Giani-Luporini: Selected Works

Manufacturer: Edipan Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

General Modern | Modern, 20th, & 21st Century | Historical Periods | Classical | Styles | Music
Flute | Reeds & Winds | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music
Violin | Strings | Instruments | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Chamber Music | Classical | Styles | Music
General | Opera & Vocal | Styles | Music
ASIN: B00005YDAB
Release Date: 1997-06-24