The glistening domes of St. Mark’s Basilica seem to billow over Venice’s largest plaza. In the 19th century, when the church was already almost a thousand years old, a mosaic was added above the main entrance, with two angels hovering near Jesus and blowing the trumpets that signal the Last Judgment.
The striking placement of the image — you can’t miss it — symbolizes music’s historical centrality in the city that has been home to giants extending from the days of Vivaldi, Gabrieli, Monteverdi and Cavalli to 20th-century masters like Luigi Nono. On a recent Thursday evening at the basilica, under the auspices of the Venice Music Biennale, two choirs in lofts high above the ground faced each other across the glittering gold interior and filled the vast expanse with a “Stabat Mater” by Giovanni Croce, a piece that was written to be performed in this very space some 425 years ago.
These days, though, Venice is more of an art town. Every other year, crowds swell this floating labyrinth of twisting alleys and lapping canals for the enormous, seven-month-long Venice Art Biennale, one of the defining events of the global visual arts scene. In 2022, over 800,000 tickets were sold; this year’s iteration continues through Nov. 24.
While the Venice Film Festival (organized, like the art event, by La Biennale di Venezia) is world-famous, you could be forgiven for not knowing that under the Biennale’s umbrella are also festivals devoted to architecture, dance and theater — and to music. As fall begins, the temperature cools and the city becomes ever so slightly emptier, the music biennial opens for a two-week stretch of roughly hourlong performances; I attended nine of them over five days earlier this month.
Like the art festival, the Music Biennale ventures beyond established exhibition spaces to Venice’s palazzos and churches. It has a base at the Arsenale, a complex of old shipyards and factories, but it sprawls across the city for site-specific concerts: multichoral pieces at St. Mark’s Basilica, delicate viola da gamba duets in the ornate 16th-century Marciana Library, grand ensembles at the gilded Fenice opera house.
And like the art festival, the focus is on contemporary work, with a large quantity of commissions by major and rising figures alike. The week was, for example, my introduction to the gifted Swedish composer Lisa Streich, not yet 40, including the premiere of her meticulously off-kilter piano-percussion quartet “Orchestra of Black Butterflies.”
Even with the addition of a series devoted to experimental jazz, the programming is heavy on European modernism and its descendants, with a prevailing aesthetic of fearsomely elegant noise, pressing toward extremes of volume and texture with stylish control. This biennial isn’t a huge event, but its commissioning resources and its range, from large orchestras to intimate solos, make it a special one.
But unlike the art biennial — which is outspokenly political, with much of the work on view taking as an explicit subject Indigenous rights, migration, war, gender, environmental destruction or combinations thereof — the music biennial this year was conspicuously uninterested in the kinds of issues you find in news headlines.
Unusual in a music world lately eager to prove its broader relevance, the festival called itself “Absolute Music,” after the term Richard Wagner used to describe abstract instrumental works that weren’t attempting to depict images or stories.
Wagner meant it as criticism of the kind of art he viewed as reactionary. But in Venice, “absolute music” was intended as praise; in a program essay, the Biennale’s president, Pietrangelo Buttafuoco, celebrated a “return to pure form” in pieces that were “stripped of similitudes, associations, content, narratives.”
“Among the arts,” Buttafuoco added, music “is the only one capable of floating in the ether.”
Other program essays acknowledged that saluting music’s above-it-all purity could “risk being seen as myopic or socially irresponsible.” But ours is a content-obsessed culture; “we are a little bit destroyed by this abundance,” Lucia Ronchetti, the music biennial’s curator, said in an interview. The theory is that rejecting the overkill of facile statements masquerading as art could cultivate an ambiguity, a “productive disorientation,” with implications more radical than reactionary.
At first, I was skeptical of the festival’s theme; surely, I thought, this is not the time to relish music’s distance from the “real” world. But the rigor and craft of the works and their preparation, impressive enough on their own terms, made a strong contrast with the more political but also far more simply digestible stuff that dominated the Art Biennale. Was it such a shortcoming if a piece didn’t take a position on open borders?
Even ostensibly apolitical, seemingly purely formal music reveals certain politics. While they may not be telling a clear story, for example, concertos — like Beat Furrer’s for violin, which the WDR Symphony Orchestra of Cologne, Germany, played on Oct. 6 with Noa Wildschut as the soloist — chart the relationship between an individual and a group. (Furrer’s piece has the violinist eventually fall in line with the orchestra’s fever; make of that what you will.)
That concerto was paired with Marco Momi’s “Kinderszenen” for piano, electronics and orchestra, another work of sudden swerves, savage storms and eerie whispers. This was not the only Ronchetti program notable for its tightness. Many concert curators like to juxtapose vividly contrasting works, but she tended to stack similar ones.
This led to some lack of variety. Two percussion sextets performed on Oct. 7 — Samir Odeh-Tamimi’s new “Roaïkron” and Wolfgang Rihm’s “Tutuguri VI (Kreuze),” from 1981 — were both relentlessly, ferociously pummeling. But the overall sameness also helped draw your attention to tiny differences and details; at the end of Rihm’s piece, for example, crashed-together cymbals were pulled apart to release a gaseous shimmer of sound, the perfectly quiet conclusion to a loudly aggressive half-hour.
On Oct. 9, in a concert by the Frankfurt Opera and Museum Orchestra under Thomas Guggeis, Luca Francesconi’s “Sospeso — A Suspension of Disbelief” bore superficial resemblance to another half-hour work, Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Nocturnes”: a shared vocabulary of flickering quiet, of hushed tapping and breathing, of smoky enigma.
But the pairing served to make clear how much stronger Sciarrino’s vision and structure were. The sonic landscape of “Nocturnes” was characteristic of this composer: icy, parched, part desert, part tundra, beautiful and bare, intensely focused.
Out of the shadowy quivering and fluttering, the sudden jostle of a glass-filled box was an eruption from another, perhaps more urban world. But it was only the most dramatic of a series of unexpected yet persuasive inroads. Near the start, Sciarrino has a pianist in the orchestra play a line by the Baroque composer Alessandro Stradella in the style of Chopin; at the end, the full ensemble suddenly bursts into a bit of a Chopin solo, arranged with overripe lushness. Era and style blurred dreamily. This wasn’t an overtly political statement, but it did feel like a reflection on nostalgia and newness, on layers of history, on change through time.
The premiere of a new Sciarrino work would be the glory of any music festival, but during my week in Venice there were also two impressive pieces by Streich. “Orchestra of Black Butterflies,” for the quartet Yarn/Wire, includes pianos prepared such that paper strips flap against the strings, resonating them ever so slightly and sending out a ghostly lyricism. The piece progresses toward an unusual, endearing wittiness, evoking cartoonish high jinks and the candied, slightly woozy quality of a slowing-down music box.
And her “Stabat,” its slippery, bending harmonies written for 32 voices arranged in four choirs, helped close the biennial at St. Mark’s Basilica. It was nighttime, and the crowds were long gone. The chorus was the Cappella Marciana, the heirs to the musical forces that have reigned at the basilica for centuries; Marco Gemmani, the current maestro di cappella, holds the same position that Monteverdi and Cavalli once did.
Sung alongside 16th-century masterpieces by Croce and Palestrina, it was tribute to this city’s musical tradition — its looming past and its vital present.
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