Luigi Dallapiccola, Bruno Maderna, Luigi Nono and Luciano Berio were the most significant Italian composers of the second half of the 20th century and their very different achievements would all benefit from the intense focus of a BBC Symphony Orchestra Total Immersion day. This year Nono at least might have been given a day to himself to mark his centenary, but instead all four composers were bundled together under the title of Italian Radicals for two concerts, one given by students from the Guildhall school, the other by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins.
At least the one work by Nono in this rather meagre offering was one of his finest large-scale pieces from the 1960s, the Canti di Vita e d’Amore, composed in 1962. It’s a politically charged setting of three texts; the music is intensely wrought, the orchestral writing angry and fiercely confrontational. At its heart is the soaring, unaccompanied soprano setting of Djamila Boupacha, based on a poem by a Spanish dissident, which was negotiated with seraphic ease by Anna Dennis, while the tenor John Findon took the lead in the last movement, Tu, to a poem by Cesare Pavese.
Brabbins had begun the BBCSO’s concert with Dallapiccola’s Three Questions With Two Answers, five quietly expressive miniatures from 1962, while Maderna’s final work, his Oboe Concerto No 3, followed the Nono; Nicholas Daniel was the superb soloist, threading his oboe’s lyrical lines through the ever-changing orchestral tumult and unflinchingly meeting its extreme technical challenges. And there was more outstanding woodwind playing to begin the second half, when the BBCSO’s bass clarinettist, Thomas Lessels, played Berio’s solo Sequenza IXc as a prelude to his Sinfonia, which ended the concert, with members of the BBC Singers taking the parts originally written for the Swingle Singers. This was surely an opportunity missed, for one of Berio’s less often heard large-scale pieces of the 1960s, such as Laborintus II or Epifanie, might have replaced the now rather dated sounding Sinfonia, whose problems of balance between voices and instruments still seem insoluble in live performances, despite Brabbins’ best efforts.
