Nino Rota - Piano Concertos (Giorgia Tomassi)

Information

Composer: Nino Rota

1. Piano Concerto in C major: I. Allegro cantabile
2. Piano Concerto in C major: II. Arietta con variazioni (Andantino cantabile)
3. Piano Concerto in C major: III. Allegro
4. Piano Concerto in E major "Piccolo mondo antico": I. Allegro tranquillo
5. Piano Concerto in E major "Piccolo mondo antico": II. Andante
6. Piano Concerto in E major "Piccolo mondo antico": III. Allegro 

Giorgia Tomassi, piano
Orchestra Filharmonia della Scala
Riccardo Muti, conductor

Date: 1999
Label: EMI

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Review

A sympathetically romantic response to Rota from Tomassi and Muti which highlights, too, an inventive and intelligent composing mind

The slow movement of Nino Rota's Piano Concerto in C is quite enchanting: a memorably suave melody, like Prokofiev at his most ingratiating, is announced by woodwind solos, then subjected to variations which never disturb its simplicity. But it is never quite as naive as it sounds: one is aware of a sharp intelligence behind it, and a well-stocked musical mind. The concerto begins disconcertingly - in a brief note Riccardo Muti accurately describes it as 'like an improvisation by the child Mozart', though it is characteristic of the unhelpful documentation accompanying this release that he ascribes this opening to the E major work, which in fact begins like neo-Rachmaninov. This is followed by a much quicker, again Prokofiev-like toccata. But Rota knows what he is about - the bizarrely contrasted ideas he has chosen give him maximum opportunity for ingeniously fertile development, including agreeably showy virtuosity (written in 1960, the concerto was dedicated to Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli; I imagine he was delighted with it).

The Concerto in E minor (the booklet never mentions its subtitle or explains in what way the music relates to Antonio Fogazzaro's novel, known variously in English as The Patriot or The Little World of the Past) comes later - 1978, the year before Rota's death - and is much more romantic, indeed rather self-indulgently so in its richly coloured climaxes and rhetorical cadenzas. It is also as tuneful as you would expect from the composer of some of the most memorable film scores of the latter half of the 20th century. Its gestures, if not especially original - one thinks of Richard Addinsell as often as Rachmaninov - will please those feeling nostalgic for piano concertos the way they used to be. The opulence of Muti's direction tends to overstate Rota's moments of over-ripeness, but I have nothing but praise for Giorgia Tomassi's formidable pianism, or for the ample but never oppressive recording.

-- Michael Oliver, Gramophone

More reviews:
https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-3907/
https://www.classicstoday.com/review/review-4485/
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/apr00/rota.htm
http://www.classicalcdreview.com/rota.htm
https://www.amazon.com/Rota-2-Piano-Concertos-Nino/dp/B000031W6K

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Giovanni "Nino" Rota (3 December 1911 – 10 April 1979) was an Italian composer, pianist, conductor and academic who is best known for his film scores. During his long career Rota was an extraordinarily prolific composer, especially of music for the cinema. He wrote more than 150 scores for Italian and international productions from the 1930s until his death in 1979, and was awarded the Academy Award for Best Original Score for The Godfather Part II (1974). Alongside this great body of film work, he composed ten operas, five ballets and dozens of other orchestral, choral and chamber works, the best known being his string concerto.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nino_Rota

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Giorgia Tomassi (born 1970 in Naples) is an Italian pianist. She studied at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi in Milan, then with Franco Scala at the Accademia "Incontri col Maestro" in Imola. In 1992 she won the Arthur Rubinstein Competition in Tel Aviv. Concerts have taken her to various European countries as well as to the USA, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, South Korea and Japan. Among her CD releases are Nino Rota's concertos with the orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala conducted by Riccardo Muti, and a live recording of Lutosławski's Paganini Variations, which she played in a duo with Martha Argerich.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giorgia_Tomassi

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