** Edition of 300 copies, gold foil printed sleeve, includes 12-page booklet and 2 leporello inserts printed on translucent paper ** Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward-thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music, via stellar LPs by Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, Jean-Yves Bosseur, James Rushford, Delivery Health, Henning Christiansen, Four Horsemen, Maria Monti, Sun Ra, and whole lot more. With every subsequent release, Holidays has seemed to manage to up their game, and this is unquestionably the case with their latest, an astounding rendering of Luigi Nono’s “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” by Quartetto Maurice - one of the most celebrated ensembles currently working in the fields of experimental, contemporary, and electronic music.

Born in Venice in 1924, Luigi Nono was among the most radical and important Italian composers to emerge during the post-war period. A member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, and remaining pointedly anti-fascist, where a great many of his American and European peers veered away from political and topical matters - preferring to dedicate themselves to more abstract or formal concerns - Nono was profoundly political: a one man revolution, whose work remains a window into the creative and political potential of sound. Nono’s music emerged from the ashes of war – a voice in a social and intellectual landscape trying to cope with what had been, attempting to build a new, better world, drenched in Marxism (he officially joined the Communist Party in 1952), before, as the 1960s and '70s unfolded, becoming a voice in the international worker and student struggles and the fight against the Vietnam War. While, by the end of the 1970s and early '80s, the explicitly political content in Nono’s work became slightly less pronounced, all of the fire and human concern remained until his passing in 1990.

This is unquestionably apparent in “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima”, a piece commissioned by the city of Bonn for the 30th Beethoven Festival, which was composed between July 1979 and January 1980, and first performed on 2 June 1980 in Bad Godesberg, by the LaSalle Quartet. A crucially important work in later canon of Nono’s output, alluding to themes and approaches that would define his coming years, Holidays release of Quartetto Maurice’s - Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola) and Aline Privitera (cello) - striking rendering of this brilliant work, marking the centenary of Nono’s birth, brings all of its potency quietly roaring into the present context.

While it belongs to Luigi Nono’s forth decade of activity at the forefront of avant-garde music, “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is the first piece of chamber music in his oeuvre. While considerably smaller in the ensemble of instruments, it retains all of the monumentality, dramatic contrasts, and expressiveness, for which the composer is known within the work’s intricate microstructures, through which Nono explores the extremes of stillness. In the words of Juerg Stenzl, the “Quartet consists of stillness as well as sound, of many and long pauses. It is like an archipelago of sound emerging from that stillness only to fade again and again into those pauses. By “fragments” is meant here an extremely fragile web, which appears open on all sides and repeatedly assumes a state of motionlessness, even within the islands of sound, rather than a strict linear progression from the first note to the final chord”. 

Critically regarded as a “turning point work” that foreshadows “Prometeo” (1984/85), An extreme chamber music work, “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is both as private and political. Reflected on the shifts in his own work during this period, the composer stated: “I have not changed at all. Even tenderness, the private, has its collective, political side. Therefore my String Quartet is not the expression of a new retrospective line in me, but rather my current position of experimentation: I want the great, rebellious affirmation with the minimum means”. A woven tapestry of rises and falls that make incredible demands on its players, Quartetto Maurice’s rendering of “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is nothing short of a thing of beauty, microscopic in detail and space, while tense and furious as anything Nono ever composed. It is a masterstroke of experimental chamber music of the highest order.

Issued in a black vinyl edition of 300 copies, housed in a gold foil printed sleeve, and accompanied by a 12-page booklet which contains a set of evocative photographs of the Giudecca in Venice – which follow the aesthetics of the fragment – realized by Sophie-Anne Herin, a precious musicological contribution by Francesca Scigliuzzo, and 2 leporello inserts printed on translucent paper, it’s as beautiful and striking an object as the sounds that it contains. Once again, Holidays has pulled out all the stops and dropped a marvel in our midsts.