Bruno Maderna - Complete Works for Orchestra Vol. 3

Bruno MADERNA (1920-1973) 

Complete Works for Orchestra Vol. 3

Ausstrahlung, for female voice, flute, oboe, large orchestra and tape

Biogramma, for large orchestra

Grande Aulodia, for flute, oboe and orchestra

Carole Sidney Louis (soprano), Thaddeus Watson (flute) & Michael Sieg (oboe)

Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra

Arturo Tamayo

Bruno Maderna · Orchesterwerke · Vol. 3

Bruno Maderna was the embodiment of the free spirit among the protagonists of the European post-war avant-garde. More than anyone else, he was both a visionary and a practitioner and, with unpretentious understatement, described his oeuvre as “Kapellmeister music”. The truth about it was that, as an expressive and highly sensitive conductor who did not believe in dry objectivity, he understood more about the orchestra and had a broader horizon of music history than his colleagues.

His conducting repertoire, which included early music as well as great symphonies, reads like a lexicon of advanced modernism. He did not believe in the rigorous radicalism represented by Boulez, Stockhausen or Nono and compared the entrenched ideological positions with the religious war between the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation. In his music, tradition and the new and unknown always interact fruitfully, and the idea of ​​stylistic hermeticism seemed to him to be an aberration and incompatible with human nature. Structural consistency and improvisation form the omnipresent extreme positions, especially in his late work, from which every new work draws.

When he was asked in December 1972, the year before his untimely death, which composers he particularly loved, he first named Debussy, Stravinsky and Schönberg, and then came to Gustav Mahler: “... that is now even more important to me as my admiration for Debussy and Schönberg, and I could carry them with me “as a banner to storm licentiousness.” It was very clear to him that the sounds are not the music, that they are only the physical vehicle, and so the Progressives' buzzword about the 'liberation of sound' actually applies to him.

Radiation  (1971) for female voice, flute, oboe, orchestra and tape is a kind of journey through the literary and intellectual history of Persia. It is based on ancient texts from Persia and India, both in the original language and in translation, passages from the  Bhagavad-gita , the  Rig-veda  and  Avesta , Dandin's  Kavyadarsa , by Rudaghi, Omar Khayyam, Nizami Aruzi and Abdallah Saadi. The texts are partly recited live by the voice, partly in German (spoken by Maderna's wife Christina) from the tape.

These are testimonies of deep spirituality, which are joined together like a mosaic with ecstatic and contemplative expression and thus reflect Maderna's view of humanity, the imperfection and complexity of life. The musical structure is correspondingly differentiated and works with permutative mobility, montage, indetermination and fragmentation. As a whole, the work consists of seven 'modules' (or 'emanations'), which are independent of each other and interchangeable in order and differ from one another in terms of length, sound character, notation and form.

Some of these 'emanations' are determined and closed in terms of all parameters, others leave the exact execution to the will of the musicians. For the solo instruments involved – flute and oboe, his two favorites – the composer incorporates materials from the existing context ( Solo  from 1971) or creates music that is then released into its own life ( Dialodia , 1971–72). The order of the seven 'emanations' is determined by the conductor, who has the task of determining the form. Radiance  is a sounding kaleidoscope, a 'concerting building block', the foundation of which is the ideas of freedom, limitations and constant new inventions.

Maderna's major late works are not conceived as closed forms and take on a different form with each performance. In this respect, of course, the present recordings only offer one of many possibilities. In the three parts of  Biogramma  (1972), Maderna uses very different compositional methods, moving between the extremes of maximum freedom and maximum rigor. Compared to the previous orchestral works  Aura  and  Quadrivium  , the musical structure is more nervous and fragmented. Maderna makes extensive use of pauses, which both introduce silence and emphasize internal articulation.

The orchestration shows him at the peak of his mastery with precisely listened, subtly calculated changes in timbres and tempos. Everything in  Biogramma  speaks of opposites and references. Different instrumental groups emerge in the different sections and create contrasting color worlds. These include very lyrical developments in which the English horn in particular plays a key role. Horizontal surface formations alternate with vertical blocks. Moments of great tonal condensation are juxtaposed with fraying and discontinuous states.

Grande Aulodia  for flute, oboe and orchestra, one of Maderna's most fascinating creations, was written in 1970 for the soloists Severino Gazzelloni and Lothar Faber. Here too, the contrast between structured determination and aleatoric-improvisational indetermination, which Maderna continued to pursue until his last work, the 3rd Oboe Concerto from 1973, and which is his main, forward-looking achievement, forms form. Unlike later in  Biogramma  , the major sections flow into one another without a break.

Aulodia  refers to the archaic aulos, a type of oboe with a sound closer to the flute, and the melody, reminiscent of old folk songs in its elegiac playfulness, is born from a spirit that evokes antiquity. What is unique is the completely unconventional orchestral setup with the woodwinds directly in front of the conductor, the two soloists on the left of the ramp, and the three separate string groups, between which the percussion and brass are arranged.

This setup effectively supports the impression of the mobility of the sound in the room. The basic style of  Grande Aulodia  is the lyrical flow from episode to episode, each with a different sound character, with the soloists and orchestra groups always reacting differently to one another. In this work, Maderna achieves a continuity of dramaturgy that is striking given the stylistic devices involved. The world-lost singing of the two soloists opens and closes the work (the flautist also plays alto and bass flute, the oboist also plays English horn and musette).

The shape of  Grande Aulodia  is three-part. In the first section of the first part, the two soloists act like two narrators, whose story gradually flows from the initial intonation of the oboe A, small cells are developed into more extensive figures. In the middle section, the three string groups create a clearly contrasting, expressionistically colored atmosphere, the almost invisible waltz character in the background is reminiscent of Mahler and Alban Berg from a distance.

The third section of the first part begins with a dialogue between the soloists, commented on by three cellos, which are gradually joined by further strings. Drums and brass interrupt the idyll. The aleatoric middle section of the work is introduced slowly and quietly, in which the conductor determines the intensity, duration and order of the entries. An invigorating flute solo leads into the final part of the work, in which the two soloists appear in unison, the fusion creates a warm timbre, a “big aulos” is created. The strings become ever quieter, forming the wonderful sound foil that acts as an atmospheric background for the endless singing of the soloists.

Christoph Schlüren

(using the introductory text by Angela Ida De Benedictis)