Luigi Nono among the Aeroplanes

“Caminantes, no hay caminos, hay que caminar…” (Wayfarers, there are no paths, yet you must walk…). This inscription found on the wall of a monastery in Toledo inspired the spatial composition for violin and eight-track tape La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura (1989) by Italian composer Luigi Nono. This bold, fascinating work will be performed together with Six Caprices for solo violin (1976) by Salvatore Sciarrino, a piece closely connected with Niccolò Paganini’s famous 24 Caprices Op. 1. The soloist for the evening will be Hana Kotková, a highly sought-after world performer of contemporary music. She will be partnered by a specialist in Luigi Nono’s work, Veniero Rizzardi. The audience arriving on this occasion at the Transport Hall of the National Technical Museum is in for an unusual sonic experience that treads a fine line between concert and site-specific performance. Simply imagine the violinist moving about in the space, whose “camino” (path) is determined by an electronic track.

“This idea of continually wandering, journeying aimlessly into the unknown, fascinates me,” states Hana Kotková of Nono’s composition. The artist, who has made Switzerland her second home, is a laureate of the 1997 Prague Spring competition. She received great support and mentoring from Yehudi Menuhin, with whom she travelled on a series of concert tours in Europe and the USA. Today she is in high demand as a performer of contemporary music. She gave her debut at Carnegie Hall with Luca Francesconi’s piece Riti neurali, and at the Lincoln Center with György Ligeti’s Violin Concerto. In 2012 she performed the American premiere of Morton Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra at the festival Beyond Cage, accompanied by the Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava under conductor Petr Kotík. She is also involved in multimedia projects, one of these being an appearance with Iva Bittová in György Kurtág’s Kafka Fragments at the Sydney Festival. She is a regular guest of the contemporary music festival Ostrava Days and has participated in the MITO SettembreMusica festival and the Martha Argerich Project in Lugano. “I am delighted to present to the Prague Spring audience two important contemporary Italian composers whom I greatly admire,” she says. “Their inclusion in the same programme is not coincidental. La lontananza by Luigi Nono (1924–1990) is dedicated to Sciarrino (*1947), an “exemplary walker”, as Nono refers to him in the dedication. Predetermined paths and marked, safe routes don’t exist; what’s important is to disregard dogmas and markings and instead open up to the idea of utopia and constant searching, to be free, like the ʽcaminantesʼ with no goal whatsoever,” she adds. La lontananza nostalgica utopica futura is the result of collaboration between Nono and violinist Gidon Kremer, who improvised for three days in a recording studio and Nono then incorporated this sound recording into the violin part and the electronic track. The tape – today most likely a digitised copy – plays for sixty-one minutes, which is also the maximum duration of the performance; the sound engineer, however, can edit the tape at random, or amplify and lower the sound, either in response to the violinist’s performance, or in line with the formal conception.