Henze and Nono

Hat tip to Geoff Coupe who points me to an article on Henze's new opera Phaedra, very thought provoking:

Nowadays it's enough for Henze when he sits there like that to direct his gaze to the five telegraph wires behind the old wall in order to imagine twelve-tone series in these airy staves. "More and more I would see an E-flat, an F, a C-sharp…" And certain complex polyphonic passages, he says, "I didn't need to check on the piano, they were simply right.

I spent some of yesterday listening to Henze's oratio 'The Raft of the Medusa...
And in today's Guardian is an article on another Italian composer (Henze was German but has lived in Italy for 50 years) Luigi Nono:

Hans Werner Henze, whose second symphony was first performed in the same concert, recalls that Nono's Variations hit their first audience "hard, so hard that they whistled as if in pain". The evocation of Schoenberg may have been part of the problem. Schoenberg's Op 41 is a setting of Byron's "Ode to Napoleon", and when Schoenberg wrote the piece in 1944, he conceived it as a protest against totalitarian tyranny. Nono wanted to align his own work with both the atonal modernism pioneered by Schoenberg and the political sentiments of the ode, but his music has none of Schoenberg's romantic rhetoric. To an audience for whom Schoenberg's music - banned in Germany throughout the second world war - was difficult enough, the generation gap between old and new modernists must have appeared painfully wide.

I don't know that work and am not sure whether the BBC is broadcasting any of the current Nono festival - I hope it's going to be recorded for a future broadcast but I won't hold my breath!
Both Henze and Nono distinctly composers of the left!