Igor Stravinsky, Luigi Nono, Mirjam Tally, and Juste Janulyte: two composers who have left their mark in past and recent musical history are the protagonists of the inaugural concert, together with two new and almost unpublished composers. Their presence and the execution of their music illuminate the title and very idea of the Festival –Roots / Future– indicating how our roots must co-exist with a discussion about the future.
It is in these roots that the tradition of Venice and the Biennale is based: after many years, the opening concert will offer Stravinsky’s Canticum Sacrum, performed by the Orchestra and Choir of the Teatro La Fenice.
Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) wrote the Canticum Sacrum ad Honorem Sancti Marci Nominis in 1955 as a personal tribute to a city to which he was deeply bound. A constant presence in the Biennale Musica – with a Sonata for piano (1925), Capriccio (1934), The Rake’s Progress (1951), and the Canticum itself – Stravinsky chose Venice as his last home.
The 52nd International Festival of Contemporary Music provides a homage to one of its greatest protagonists, inaugurating the event with the Canticum Sacrum. Varied in style, and embracing neoclassical forms as well as dodecaphonic experimentation, from Gregorian chant to Webern, but symmetrical and balanced in structure, the Canticum Sacrum was conducted personally by the composer on 13th September 1956 with the Orchestra del Teatro La Fenice.
Alongside Stravinsky, the inaugural concert also offers another leading protagonist of modern music and of the Biennale Musica: Luigi Nono (1924-1990), No hay caminos, hay que caminar … Andrei Tarkowskij, performed for the first time in 1987 at the Suntory Hall in Tokyo, which had commissioned the work from him, and later in 1993 at the Biennale di Venezia for the“Con Luigi Nono” series curated by Mario Messinis.
“An event, and experience, the text for our existence touches my instinct and my awareness and demands that I, as musician and as a man, bear witness to it”, wrote Luigi Nono. Thus, the title of No hay caminos, hay que caminar was taken from a 12th-century text Nono found on a wall in Toledo. Recalling the suggestions from which the piece arises, on the occasion of the Japanese premiere, he noted: “Yesterday-today: a refusal of the dogmas of fixed models a human need to seek risk overcome without limits to listen to the different the other. To create inventing other feelings other techniques other languages in the human technical transformation for other possibilities necessities of life – for other utopias” (from Luigi Nono Scritti e colloqui, edited by A.I. De Benedictis and V. Rizzardi, Milan 2001).
