Luigi Nono A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida (1966)

As part of the 55th International Festival of Contemporary Music organised by the Venice Music Biennale, there will be a world première of a new version of the piece entitled “The forest is young and full of life”. The event, coordinated by Veniero Rizzardi with the assistance of Alberto Bianco Sound director Alvise Vidolin, has been made possible through collaboration with the Giorgio Cini Foundation Institute of Music (laboratorioarazzi), the Luigi Nono Archive and the A. Steffani State Conservatory, Castelfranco Veneto.

A floresta é jovem e cheja de vida is a key work in Luigi Nono’s career as composer.
This work was conceived in collaboration with writer Giovanni Pirelli from 1965 to 1966 as an idea for a new opera based on documentary texts, i.e. letters, statements, speeches. Their idea was that the texts should reflect the subjective experience of the often painful or fatal involvement in political struggles. A floresta became a model for
almost all the works that Nono composed over the next ten years and was the workthat, as conductor and sound director, he performed longer than any other on various tours. Due to its experimental nature, it was never written down as a score. Only in 1998, the publishers Ricordi asked Maurizio Pisati and Veniero Rizzardi to reconstruct
a performable score based on the many written, audio and visual documents in the Luigi Nono Archive in Venice.
Nono did actually make a recording of A floresta as early as 1966. On that occasion he assembled material that has survived to the present day. We can thus now synchronise the isolated original soloist parts (voices, clarinet and percussion) with the eight tracks of our base and then play the whole according to Nono’s spatial instructions. This new experiment enables us to listen to the work in almost concert conditions with the twofold benefit of being able to hear the original voices in a particularly careful performance recorded by the composer.