At 2 hours 20 minutes, with no breaks between movements, with vast stretches of music in slow motion devoid of momentum, with the dynamic level often hovering around the threshold of audibility and with many of the ordinary hierarchies of musical values rearranged or simply jettisoned, the work, to a libretto by the philosopher Massimo Cacciari, does not give a listener a lot of familiar ground to cling to.
