Luigi Nono's rant against injustice ("Beneath the great sun, filled with love") is such an extreme piece, binding bald communist texts to complex musical structures without narrative, that any company staging it is viewed as progressive. But already, barely 30 years after the Milan premiere, it sounds like a work of musical archaeology, an impression intensified by Katie Mitchell's Salzburg production.
What Nono, a lifelong political activist, would have made of Sunday's black-tie audience is anyone's guess: this is a festival that emblazons the names of sponsors (Nestlé, Credit Suisse, Siemens etc) across every space it can find. Al gran sole appeals primarily to armchair socialists. It belongs in student campuses and seminaries or in Latin America's leftwing dictatorships. How wonderful, then, that only the capitalist elite are entitled these days to hear its dreams of revolution.
