Alfredo Casella - Orchestral Music Vol. 2 (Gianandrea Noseda)

Information

Composer: Alfredo Casella

• (01) Concerto for Orchestra, Op. 61
• (04) A notte alta, Op. 30
• (09) Symphonic Fragments from 'La donna serpente', Op. 50

Martin Roscoe, piano
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra
Gianandrea Noseda, conductor

Date: 2012
Label: Chandos
https://www.chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2010712

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Review

Second disc in Noseda’s BBC Phil Casella series

The music of Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) charts a fascinating stylistic journey. Early in his career he was a bold progressive well and truly under the spell of Mahler (whose Seventh Symphony he arranged for two pianos), Schoenberg and Stravinsky. You can hear all of this in the remarkable A notte alta (‘In Deepest Night’), originally conceived for solo piano and dating from 1917 (the present reworking for piano and orchestra was fashioned for an American tour four years later). With its deeply personal programme of two lovers clandestinely meeting at night (revealingly, the title-page bears a dedication to Yvonne Müller, a student with whom the composer was having an affair), it’s a moody, at times downright sinister soundscape, the dark-hued scoring reminiscent of, say, Roussel’s or Bax’s Second Symphonies, but more harmonically adventurous than either of those imposing masterworks (Casella himself is not afraid to embrace atonality).

The two purely orchestral offerings are entirely different again. First staged in 1932, Casella’s opera based on Carlo Gozzi’s dramatic fable La donna serpente (‘The Serpent Woman’) enjoyed only modest success. The composer promptly extracted two hugely colourful series of Symphonic Fragments from the opera. Readers with a fondness for Respighi and Pizzetti will enjoy themselves famously. And, from time to time, I also detected the influence of Busoni’s superb 1905 incidental music for Gozzi’s Turandot. Inspiration runs comparably high in the Concerto for Orchestra that Casella composed in 1937 for the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 50th anniversary and whose idiom now has rather more of a neo-classical flavour (Hindemith’s orchestral music from the same decade springs to mind).

Need I add that both performances and sound are absolutely out of the top drawer? Enthusiastically recommended. I look forward to future instalments.

-- Andrew Achenbach, Gramophone

More reviews:

BBC Music Magazine  PERFORMANCE: **** / RECORDING: ****

ClassicsToday  ARTISTIC QUALITY: 9 / SOUND QUALITY: 9

MusicWeb International  RECORDING OF THE MONTH

https://www.bbc.co.uk/music/reviews/5cnv/

http://www.classicalsource.com/db_control/db_cd_review.php?id=10160

http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2012/Aug12/Casella_orch_v2_CHAN10712.htm

http://www.classicalmusicsentinel.com/KEEP/keep-casella-concerto.html

https://www.allmusic.com/album/alfredo-casella-concerto-for-orchestra-a-notte-alta-fragments-symphoniques-de-la-donna-serpente-mw0002341185

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Alfredo Casella (25 July 1883 in Turin – 5 March 1947 in Rome) was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor. He entered the Paris Conservatoiry in 1896 to study piano under Louis Diémer and composition under Gabriel Fauré. In this period, Casella developed a deep admiration for Debussy's output, but pursued a more romantic vein in his own writing. His work on Italian Baroque composers put him at the centre of the early 20th Century Neoclassical revival and also deeply influenced his own compositions. The resurrection of Vivaldi's works in the 20th century is mostly thanks to the efforts of Casella.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfredo_Casella

***

Gianandrea Noseda (born 23 April 1964) is an Italian conductor. He studied piano, composition and conducting in Milan and furthered his conducting studies with Donato Renzetti, Myung-Whun Chung and Valery Gergiev. Noseda was Principal Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from 2002 to 2011 and now has the title of conductor laureate. In January 2016, Noseda was appointed music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C. In February, 2016, he was also appointed one of the two "principal guest conductors" of the London Symphony Orchestra.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianandrea_Noseda
http://www.gianandreanoseda.com/home_e.aspx

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

FLAC, tracks

Links in comment

Enjoy!