On Thursday, San Diegans had a rare opportunity to hear the great 20th-century composer Luigi Nono’s penultimate work, “La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura” in UC San Diego’s Calit2 Theatre.

That title is not readily translatable, but the work’s dedicatee, composer Salvatore Sciarrino, offers this explanation: “The past reflected in the present brings about a creative utopia, the desire for what is known becomes a vehicle for what will be possible through the medium of distance.”

The subtitle of the work is “Madrigal for a few ‘travelers’ with Gidon Kremer” scored for solo violin, eight tapes, and eight to 10 music stands.

Kremer met with Nono and improvised music which Nono reassembled into an 8-track tape recording. Two of those channels don’t feature Kremer’s violin, but rather capture dialogs between him and Nono as well as noises in the studio such as chairs scraped on floors or clanged metal stands.

For the premiere, Kremer performed with that eight-channel recording. The score gave the violinist great latitude in tempo and determining when the six different sections started. Nono requested that it be distributed on six music stands spread throughout the venue, with the addition of two to four extra stands without music, just to thicken the plot.

The musician at the mixing board must “play” the tape, determining which channels are emphasized and where the sound is placed in the hall over 8 speakers. The playback person responds to the violin soloist, as does the violinist with the tape.

The subtitle “madrigal” harks back to the Renaissance form where all voices have independence; the “travelers” allude to the eight channels of sound featuring Kremer and Nono themselves. It is a work with nine equally important parts which will never be the same twice, as comparison of the five different CD recordings makes clear.

Instead of eight speakers, Thursday’s performance gave us two parallel banks of 256 mini-speakers total in a system designed by UCSD Department of Theater and Dance professor Bobby McElver. With these speakers and computer software (and a mixing board), Department of Music Ph.D. candidate Michelle Helene Mackenzie was able to control the placement of sound in the small space of Calit2 Theater with a sophistication far beyond what eight speakers and a mixing board can do.

Violinist Marco Fusi, right, perform among the audience for Luigi Nono’s “La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura” at UC San Diego on Feb. 22.

(Courtesy of Christian Hertzog)

Violinist Marco Fusi memorized his part, so music stands were not needed. This allowed him to move more freely among the roughly six dozen people in the hall, chairs arranged arbitrarily in all directions.

In Nono’s last decade, his music underwent a drastic change from the violent, overwhelming scores that established him as a leader of the avant-garde. Forms became more unpredictable and he became infatuated with sounds on the verge of inaudibility.

In the third section of “Lontananza,” the violinist is instructed to play at the dynamic level of ppppppppp, five or six degrees of softness beyond what most composers would dare specify. In a larger hall, this music won’t be heard at all unless the tape part drops out dramatically. In the intimacy of Calit2, however, I could always hear Fusi.

Nono passed away before a definitive edition of the violin part could be prepared. It is full of contradictions that an interpreter must resolve, but Nono also provides performers great latitude in tempos and encourages the violinist to introduce tiny pitch deviations into what appear to be long, sustained tones in the score.

Fusi has absorbed this work (he recorded it in 2020), and his interpretation was both bold and respectful.

With Mackenzie’s intriguing playback choices, this was a masterful performance of a rarely-encountered genre-defying work.

Hertzog is a freelance writer.