Voices from the realm of shadows - retrospective Luigi Nono at Holland Festival

After impressive retrospectives dedicated to John Cage (2012) and Edgard Varèse (2009), the Holland Festival this year put Venetian composer Luigi Nono in the spotlight. Under the title 'Trilogy of the sublime', the imposing Gashouder was the epicentre of three full-length concerts, short 'Nono interventions' sounded in the Rijksmuseum's subway, a two-day symposium was organised around Nono, and his widow Nuria set up an exhibition entitled 'Maestro di suoni i silenzi'.

With such large-scale projects, outgoing artistic director Pierre Audi has put the Holland Festival back on the map: anyone who wants to count for something on the cultural circuit headed to the Westergasfabriek grounds last weekend. For three nights, the Gashouder - an "industrial cathedral" with a capacity of around a thousand people - was virtually sold out and the audience's reaction was undiminished.

I myself was only able to attend two concerts: the opening night, with the almost two-and-a-half-hour-long Prometeo and the closing night with two parts of the cycle Caminantes. Both nights, German conductor Ingo Metzmacher led the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg and the singers of the Schola Heidelberg (assisted on Thursday by conductor Matilda Hofman). On Thursday evening, soloists from the German ensemble recherche also performed; on Sunday, they joined forces with the Dutch choir Cappella Amsterdam led by their own chief conductor Daniel Reuss.

Next to the main stage, platforms have been erected at different heights around the audience, with smaller ensembles in varying formations on them. This breaks down the usual hierarchy of listening, with an orchestra on stage and the audience in front of it, and places the listener himself in the centre of the music. As a convinced communist, Nono not only strove to break down the boundaries between haves and have-nots, but also between the sound and its receiver. To this end, electronics are also used, which were designed and controlled by Swiss sound director André Richard, with whom Nono has worked extensively.

The ingenious way the electronics manipulate the physical sounds blurs their profiling. This creates an overall picture that, as a listener, you can completely immerse yourself in. Nono indeed shows himself "a master of sounds and silence", as his widow Nuria Schoenberg christened her exhibition. Singers and instrumentalists often move on the edge of silence and gradually you get the feeling of being surrounded by voices from a shadowy realm.

The gently swelling and fading sound fragments create a strongly ritualistic atmosphere that sometimes recalls a church service, especially when we hear references to Gregorian chant or the polyphonic polyphony of the Gabrieli brothers. Last night, Daniel Reuss actually led Cappella Amsterdam in the Kyrie and Gloria from the Sacrae symphoniae by Giovanni Gabrieli, which acted as accompaniment to Nono's 'No hay caminos, hay che caminar' with which the concert opened.

The title is taken from a saying Nono once read on a monastery wall in Toledo and means as much as 'There are no roads, there is only the moving on'. This aphorism is also a fine metaphor for Nono's music, which seems to be in constant search for - yes, for what exactly? The sounds floating in space are often of an unearthly beauty, with rarefied angelic chants only occasionally punctuated by more low-down brass or percussion sounds.

The music is ear-pleasing and intoxicating, but seems to constantly move in circles, giving it a static character. As a listener, you lose any sense of direction and start to wander dazedly through the brilliant but, in the long run, somewhat uniform sound structure Nono erects. The subtitle 'tragedy of listening' seems to refer unintentionally to this loss of grip, as Nono was actually striving for a new, active way of listening that would make us better and more social people. The question is whether he succeeds in this: we are lulled to sleep rather than awakened by the mostly - deliberately - unintelligible lyrics.

But it is still a special experience, and maybe we should also just experience Nono's music instead of trying to fathom her.