Hermann Nitsch

Few instruments have so captured the human imagination as the organ: its ability to generate continuous sound that does not decay like that of a piano or harpsichord, but remains suspended in an eternity that only the performer's will can violate, has made it the most plausible musical transposition of the voice of God, as solemn and hieratic as the mammoth dimensions of some of its specimens. Every major composer of every era has, sooner or later, had to reckon with the instrument that inspires more awe than any other, almost always emerging subjugated by its terms: whoever wants to tame it must feed it strictly sacred music. Perhaps that's why the few who have dared to profane it have produced scores resembling what the chaos before Creation or after the Apocalypse might have sounded like: sinful music, but superhuman all the same.

Two years ago, in this very church and again as part of the AngelicA Festival (can we finally just say it's the most precious musical event in Italy, if not in Europe?), Pisa-born Francesco Filidei gave us an astonishing display of musical heresy, accompanying none other than Roscoe Mitchell: spurred on by the anguished squeals of the Chicagoan titan, the pipes of the magnificent Tamburini organ turned into a berserk electrophone spewing mangled, spectral notes, splashes of colour flung like on a Pollock canvas, a monstrous expanse like a sea in a storm. An experience that anyone who was there will struggle to forget, and one that this afternoon will find an equally memorable follow-up.

Hermann Nitsch has done so many things, and such grave ones, that watching him officiate a pagan mass inside a Christian basilica feels, all things considered, like small fry. It's no surprise that he chose Bologna for this Italian premiere of his ORGELKONZERT: it was in this very city, back in 1977, that he held one of his most notorious performances as part of the Settimana Internazionale della Performance organised by the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, an event that also featured Marina Abramovic and Ulay, Laurie Anderson, Gina Pane and Luigi Ontani. Watching him up close as he makes his way to his station, he looks little like the scandalous terrorist-guru who has battered 20th-century art like a prostitute in the hands of a serial killer: a little man stooped over his cane, with an unkempt beard more reminiscent of an Orthodox Father Christmas than a wild-eyed Rasputin. Likeable, almost good-natured: and perhaps, precisely because of that, all the more unsettling. After a diligent introduction by curator Leopoldo Siano, who also performs alongside Josef Smutny and the Viennese non-musician himself (who has meanwhile warmed up with some unidentified liqueur), the ritual can begin. Four acts will follow, as in the most classic of symphonies, but with results that are anything but academic: his own deeply personal, and far from reassuring, idea of "music of the spheres."

The first opens with an extremely long drone, as motionless as a dead rhinoceros just beginning to decompose, which gradually modulates into a grating cluster. It seems to want to wear us down through sheer exasperation, like certain unresolved elevations by Charlemagne Palestine, but just when we've grown numb to it, it pulls the rug out from under us by mimicking the trot of a horn, then a trumpet blast, before returning to its enervating levitation. We're in the vicinity of La Monte Young's viscous drones but, unlike the Theatre of Eternal Music, the Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries favours torture over ecstasy: and here it is, sharpening its axe in an ever more dissonant spiral, until it becomes a vortex engulfing us in a papier-mâché hell straight out of an expressionist film. Just as cinematic, though closer to a Z-grade slasher, is the blade that rips through the frame, spraying fuchsia jets every which way before cutting off treacherously in a brutal break, so sharp that nothing seems able to exist after a pause so lacerating.

The second, slightly more courteous and less schizoid, opens by laying out little Ligeti-esque notes resembling drops of murky water, followed by a silence more parodic than austere. It picks up again on a higher register but with a hazy timbre and a somewhat sinister steadiness, soon stretched by a piercing lament. The whole thing conjures up different images in turn: a swamp, a fountain, a magnetic field. The sound seethes in a visceral way – viscera being the operative word. Is it a coincidence that a splatter enthusiast like Nitsch favours an instrument that, in more than one language, shares its name with the systemic units of those bodies he so loves tearing apart?

The third seems engineered from the drawing board purely to irritate us: sourish, it gurgles for a while before spitting out ulcerous flares, snuffed out by an effect that resembles a Leslie speaker but almost certainly isn't. The finale, a wind as saturated as an injection of white noise, shows just how much a pipe organ can emulate a steampunk synthesiser, if desecrated with the right amount of relish.

The last movement loops back in some way to the contradictory moods of the first: chirping birds and slashes straight to the face, an invisible cello skewering us like a hatpin, a mass of air condensing into a dragon's breath, then a downpour or perhaps a clap of thunder. What follows is something that, eyes closed, we could once again mistake for a synth, shot down mid-flight into a chaos that brings night down over the entire universe, just as the sun is setting beyond the stained-glass windows.

A long pause: is it over? Impossible to tell, and the protagonist seems to be having the time of his life keeping us on tenterhooks, smirking at the thought of the mental journeys we're concocting to justify a silence so plausibly loaded with meaning. Yes, it's over, and once again we're left feeling like fools. A hailstorm of applause, if only to feel a little less stupid. Smiling like the grandfather I never had and would never want to have, he offers himself with unexpected availability to the many cameras ready to immortalise him: is this really "the most dangerous artist of the century"? He walks past me: he has a very strange smell, I couldn't say whether unpleasant or alluring, but somehow consistent with the character and the situation. Or maybe my head has finally turned to mush.

It's dinner time, but I'll be skipping it: my guts are still churning from those swirling, penetrating thrusts. I ache pretty much everywhere. I think I'll go to bed, but I'll make an effort to stay awake: after a concert like this, risking a dream is the last thing one should wish for.

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