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.
