Yesterday night I greeted Maestro Noseda after a concert in the fine lake resort of Stresa.
He said me, not confidentially, that he has recorded Casella Concerto for Orchestra op. 61 (1937).
It is a substantial work (unrecorded till now) lasting about twenty-five minutes.
The coupling or couplings (again by Casella) have not yet decided.
ooh, I like pieces with central passacaglias. (Hrm. There is a noncommercial reel-to-reel conducted by Antonini, Munich Philharmonic, at U Texas at Austin. Not the same, but interesting maybe to know.)
From the Gramophone:
This music making will now be channelled into broadening beyond opera the public knowledge of 20th-Century Italian music. The discs will focus on previously unrecorded symphonic repertoire by the main 20th-Century Italian symphonic composers including Alfedo Casella, Goffredo Petrassi and Ildebrando Pizzetti. The first CD, which is due for release in June 2012, will see Noseda conducting the BBC Philharmonic in works by Casella, including A notte alta, the symphonic fragments from the opera La donna serpente, and the Concerto per Orchestra.
This is great news as the disc of symphony no 2 i great, and clearly superior to the admirable Naxos series.
Great to hear that we are going to get Casella's Concerto for Orchestra :)
The Pizzetti Symphony should, presumably, follow ;D
Great news, but check out alberto's topic Forthcoming Casella by Chandos from 31st of august! Maybe our administrators can merge these two topics together?
Morten
A sensible suggestion Morten - I've done just that.
I don't know how you did it, but it worked vey well!
Morten
I shall keep the mysteries of Forum management to myself, I think. :)
Great! I wasn't aware of that thread - though I searched for Casella in the composer forum.
The search feature in this forum is at best so difficult to learn, I think, that it's perhaps better, relatively speaking, in searching the public areas of the Unsung Composers Forums to use Google ("stuff" site:unsungcomposers.com ).
Yes, the search is not easy. I find the best thing to do is to go to the home page and search from there. Searching within a board seldom yields useful results. I wish it were otherwise, but there we are...
The second volume of Casella from Chandos is scheduled for release at the end of April.
As we know from Alberto, the disc contains the Concerto for Orchestra. The couplings are A notte alta and two orchestral Suites from the opera La donna serpente.
Details here:
http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Chandos/CHAN10712 (http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Chandos/CHAN10712)
Morten
Excellent news :)
The problem with the Pizzetti Symphony is that it was dedicated to the Imperial Japanese Dynasty in 1940. Lousy timing. I think it was ever only performed in Tokyo. I hope Hirohito and his War Cabinet enjoyed it. I would someday hope to hear it myself.
The Pizzetti Symphony wasn't performed only once in Tokyo. True, it was dedicated to the Emperor of Japan, but as a result of a commission ( extended, between, the European composers to R.Strauss, Pfitzner, Veress and....Britten: to the last resulting in the rejection of the Sinfonia da Requiem). The Japanese choice of composers was not - I would say- "political".
Pizzetti himself (while no opponent) was not a Fascism supporter (within the limits of a much revered composer, covering important teaching charges) in a regime.
For instance in my city , Torino, The Pizzetti Symphony has been performed three times. In 1946 and 1955, conducted by Pizzetti himself. Still in 1976 it was recorded by Ferdinando Previtali (without public) for a TV broadcast. I saw and heard it in television, in the frame of a (now unbelievable) series "The Symphony of the XX century" (there were, for instance, Elgar First -conducted by Gianluigi Gelmetti- and Walton Second- conducted by Zdenek Macal).
Indeed by 1976 Pizzetti, like Casella and Malipiero, was already and since years "out fashion". The Italian radio had a very long "Glock period"; almost only avantagarde works were admitted as novelties (even if I have to admit that Italian avantgarde listed at least three -in their gendre- important composers: Maderna, Nono and Berio -the first two pupils of Malipiero).
Much later than 1976 an acquaintaince of mine presented me with a Cd recording with a radio broadcast of the Symphony (Nino Sanzogno conducting the Milano radio orch. in the '60s).
That broadcast as fas as I know has never released commercially. Being very unpratical with the web, I am not able to make an upload.
Anyway I assure friends of the forum that it is a magnificent (and substantial: 42'46") four movements Symphony (maybe a little celebrative, only in the Finale; decidedly conservative in idiom in respect to Casella's Third).
I hope in a commercial recording and deem it possible.
The Pizzetti Symphony is a work I have long hoped to hear.
I think other than Britten, the commissions were political. Germany, Italy and Hungary were all in fact fascist dictatorships. How did Britten get into the mix? I meant no implication that Pizzetti was in any way a fascist. It was the time he lived in and composers are notoriously naive about politics and politicians (pace Shostakovich). Mussolini was a great supporter of the arts. In fact, Mussolini did many great things for Italy until he cozied up to Hitler. Pizzetti was a magnificent composer and a fine man whose music I love very much. I would love to hear the Symphony some day.
You can hear the Pizzetti Symphony in a rather extraordinary performance by the original conductor and orchestra on a recent Japanese CD: Altus ALT103. It's a double CD that comes with what I assume were the other 1940 commissions: Strauss's Festmusik, Ibert's Ouverture de Fete, Veress's First Symphony, and a piece by the local composer Hidemaro Konoye. As to Pizzetti, he engaged eagerly with the fascist regime at the highest level, and received all its most prestigious honours. His politics were already ultra-nationalist before WWI, like those of so many Italian intellectuals of his generation, especially those associated (as he was) with Gabriele D'Annunzio.
By the way Hidemaro Konoye, pupil of Reger and d'Indy, and himself a member of the imperial family and brother of a (prime?)minister, was the first ever to record Mahler's Fourth (Tokyo, 1930).
As to Pizzetti, as far as I have read, I never read about him as an ardent fascist. He received the most prestigious honours by the Republic of Italy after 1945.
Even Toscanini was still in 1920 nationalist and favourable to D'Annunzio enterprises: he conducted a concert for D'Annunzio and his henchmen in Fiume, a contended city occupied by the "poet-soldier" and his troops. Montemezzi and Sinigaglia (himself later sadly a Nazis victim) attended.
In 1933 or 1934 Pizzetti's Second Quartet was premiered by the Busch Quartet in the Italian holiday residence of Toscanini (who has given up conducting in Italy for political reasons).In the small audience Toscanini, Pizzetti, Elisabeth Sprague Coolidge, Fritz Busch, Mieczislaw Horszowsky, Rudolf Serkin, Sinigaglia, Enrico Mainardi........On that occasion Pizzetti and two of the Busch performed the Composer's Piano Trio.
Given the disgrace suffered by composers like Casella himself and Mascagni at the end of the Second World War Pizzetti seems to have been, at least, more successful in managing to have separated himself from association with Fascism.
The sad truth of the matter is that virtually every Italian composer active in the 1920s and 1930s, to a greater or lesser extent, gave support to or benefited from the endorsement of Mussolini's government, including those who would later profess to have been resolutely anti-Fascist. This is not intended as a criticism of those composers per se but a commentary on an exceptionally difficult period in Italian history and on the compromises most people make in circumstances which are, at best, mixed and cloudy.
Critical assaults on Casella for the allegedly fascist content of his music did not really get under way until the the mid-1960s, long after his death (in 1947). The immediate post-war years are a fascinating grey zone, in which reputations (such as Pizzetti's) could indeed be re-made. Quite how Pizzetti managed the transition from fascism (the regime made him a member of the Accademia d'Italia, among other honours: the highest it could bestow on an artist) to his later status as the grand old man of the Christian Democrat establishment is a story that has never been told, and one that would doubtless shed a great deal of light on the political and artistic compromises of post-war Italian musical history. Compromise is not a word I would use of Italian composers in the 1930s. What is rarely acknowledged is the way in which fascism created something of a paradise for Casella, Pizzetti, Malipiero and co. The regime introduced massive state subsidies for arts organisations (most famously the various festivals), and took especial care of its younger talents. No curbs were placed on modernist daring; indeed, it was encouraged. Figures like Dallapiccola and Petrassi responded with enthusiasm. Casella, it should be made clear, shouted the fascist content of his own music from the rooftops.
Does it (the Pizzetti) sound more like A major or minor? The score seems to suggest A minor (key of the first movement, of course, not the finale, being important here) despite an unadorned "in la" designation. One has this with some other scores as well, of about the same time and the late 19th century too (Widor 1). But I've only seen the score...
Quote from: earlebn on Thursday 29 March 2012, 20:47
Critical assaults on Casella for the allegedly fascist content of his music did not really get under way until the the mid-1960s, long after his death (in 1947). The immediate post-war years are a fascinating grey zone, in which reputations (such as Pizzetti's) could indeed be re-made. Quite how Pizzetti managed the transition from fascism (the regime made him a member of the Accademia d'Italia, among other honours: the highest it could bestow on an artist) to his later status as the grand old man of the Christian Democrat establishment is a story that has never been told, and one that would doubtless shed a great deal of light on the political and artistic compromises of post-war Italian musical history. Compromise is not a word I would use of Italian composers in the 1930s. What is rarely acknowledged is the way in which fascism created something of a paradise for Casella, Pizzetti, Malipiero and co. The regime introduced massive state subsidies for arts organisations (most famously the various festivals), and took especial care of its younger talents. No curbs were placed on modernist daring; indeed, it was encouraged. Figures like Dallapiccola and Petrassi responded with enthusiasm. Casella, it should be made clear, shouted the fascist content of his own music from the rooftops.
I am not sure that this is the correct place to continue this discussion. It might be better placed in a separate thread :)
The only point I would wish to make here in response to your very sound post is that my use of the word "compromise" referred to the attack by Respighi, Pizzetti, Zandonai and others on 'modernist' tendencies in music in December 1932. Casella and Malipiero seem to have regarded this as a coded attack on them. The difficulties Malipero got into over the opera "La Favola del Figlio Cambioto" and his dedication of his next opera "Giulio Cesare" to Mussolini seemed to me an indication of his willingness to 'bend with the wind'.
They were all pro-Mussolini but not fascists or antisemetic.
I think I could find you an Italian composer who was both a fascist and an anti-Semite. Try Francesco Santoliquido. Dundonnell is right about Malipiero. There was a period in the early-to-mid 1930s when he clearly felt that he needed to start writing music that was more obviously fascistic. As well as the opera Giulio Cesare there are the orchestral Inni. Both works were dedicated to Mussolini. The spur for this change of direction may well have been the bad experiences in 1932 and 1934 to which Dundonnell refers. But I wanted to say something about the Pizzetti Symphony. Though the Japanese performance is not great (the conductor, one Gaetano Comelli, pulls the tempi about something rotten, the orchestra is ropey, and the sound rough), the piece emerges as - to my mind - easily the most interesting of Pizzetti's large-scale pieces of the 30s and 40s in classical forms. I can imagine a recording by Noseda and the BBC Phil making a real splash. Let's hope it's next on his list.
If you have not yet invested in the newly released Chandos disc of the Concerto for Orchestra, "A notte alta" and the Symphonic Fragments from 'La donna sepente' can I recommend the disc with all possible enthusiasm :)
I have waited decades to hear the Concerto for Orchestra and it is every bit as fine and invigorating a piece as I had expected. In Casella's later neo-classical style, the Concerto is not however in any way a 'dry' work but is truly festive in celebration of the Concertgebouw Orchestra's 50th anniversary.
With the familiar superlative Chandos engineering 'A notte alta' is performed by Martin Roscoe and Noseda with a real, tangible sense of nocturnal atmosphere. It really is an amazing work, albeit in a style which Casella did not remain with for long.
Noseda has these pieces under total command and it is very much to be hoped that he goes on to record more Italian music for Chandos: Malipiero and Pizzetti, in particular.
And for those of you who want to hear Noseda conduct Casella in concert, on November 3rd he will conduct the 3rd Symphony with the BBC Phil in Manchester :D
Maybe that performance could be preliminary to a recording (so, it would be the third recording of Casella Third Symphony in a short span of time....).