I remember being fascinated by this piece when I heard a broadcast of it in high school (I think Boulez was conducting - probably Cleveland but maybe Chicago).
On the one hand, this is spatial music, clearly influenced by Stockhausen and Nono. Like all spatial music, it's impossible to properly hear on most speakers (though one could certainly make the argument that almost all music is impossible to properly hear on any recording), on the other hand, there is something about the mystery of this work that, rarer in the Darmstadt-adjacent worlds than anybody wanted to admit, has the imagination to justify its mountain of dogma. It has a few dry spots, but this is a truly compelling piece of music.
It's weird to consider that the last generation of 'high modernists' are now 'old composers.' George Benjamin is over 60, Wolfgang Rihm is nearly 70, Oliver Knussen is dead, Tristan Murail is nearly 75, Gerard Grisey's been dead for over twenty years, and Georg Friedrich Haas is now known more for his kink experiments than his musical ones. I'm old enough to remember when they were considered young.
No aesthetic death has ever been more deserved than high modernism, which literally drove hundreds of thousands out from the concert hall forever and bullied the remains to bruising, but it certainly had its compelling moments. It's sort of astounding to think that in 2021, you can still hear music that carries some of the authentic spiritual charge of Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Berg. The irony is that to present us with that spirit in 2021 is antithetical to its revolutionary spirit, and was just as antithetical fifty years ago. Modernism stood for the new, the revelatory, the assimilation of ever developing forms of refinement to increase the rawness of our experience. And yet there are hundreds of old academic composers still chewing the old fat of serialism, atonality, spectralism, aleatoricism, spatialism, and conceptualism with cosmetic spins on old formulas as absorbing to the attention span as a rearrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs. It's a complete anathema to the purpose of modernism, and in our an era when populist influenced music with political messages dominates, the entire aesthetic of modernism seems quaint and tame. The intimidating bullies of 25 years ago seem like cartoon characters responding to a world that hasn't existed for an entire lifetime.
There's so much modernist music to get through, and so much of it sucks.... but there are real, gems among it too. I'm very happy I happened on Concertante Il Suono when I was a teenager. I doubt I'd have had the patience to hear it otherwise.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7bqRsXdPQ0&fbclid=IwAR3Ayx106gnhFev-CJyOQIB65laPfi1KaD1kp9Xxk7XoUsWxFWWRDROuY_U
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