Alice Sara Ott ECHOES OF LIFE

 

ECHOES OF LIFE

Anneleen Lenaerts NINO ROTA Works for Harp

 

WORKS FOR HARP

 

Daniel Hope HOPE@HOME

HOPE@HOME

Riccardo Chailly / Filarmonica della Scala THE FELLINI ALBUM

This is good! Eighty-one minutes of Nino Rota’s music for the films of Federico Fellini – played superbly by the La Scala Philharmonic, conducted with relish and affection by Riccardo Chailly (he first met the composer in 1974), and given vivid, up-front sound-quality, albeit with a resonant overhang in tow.

The film music of Rota (1911-79, he wrote for the concert-hall and opera-house, too), whatever its merits in complementing the moving image, transcends the silver-screen medium for listening pleasure on its own terms (although a caveat might be a certain sameness across the whole).

Amarcord opens the show, saxophones, brass, an accordion and a mandolin to the fore (Rota’s original orchestration is used) – smoochy (this is a La Scala love-in), marching-bands (La Scala players know how to swagger), popular-song a mainstay (Stormy Weather being one), and if your dance-card isn’t full, take your partners, for Rota can tango-hoof it with the best of them.

He can also be relied upon for description, atmosphere, tunefulness, foot-tapping rhythms and a palette of colour that is generously broad-brushed. Take 8½ (Otto e Mezzo), dripping in picturesque sentiment and electric emotions, tinged ethereally – music that rip-roars and seduces in equal measure – and with the purloining of another well-known ditty (The Sheik of Araby, from 1921, perchance?) and a movement that owes to Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance.

The score for La dolce vita (as arranged into Suite form by William Ross, who also upgrades Amarcord for the final track) is immensely stirring and powerful, lyrically entrancing too, not forgetting hot-swing (trumpet and sax). As for Fellini’s Casanova, the music for it is sometimes like the aural equivalent of a distorting mirror, aided by Bruno Moretti’s scoring which includes harpsichord and bass guitar; there’s an off-kilter waltz, and much that is whimsical and always attractive, edgy and confrontational too, a range of emotions and situations – makes me want to see the film!

Finally, The Clowns – if you like Shostakovich in Dance/Film/Jazz mode (Chailly already has a trio of such Albums available), then you are in business; the music tumbles along irresistibly along, with an element of exotic buffoonery, and introducing Fučík’s Entry of the Gladiators (circus music par excellence) – a bit of a Thieving Magpie was Rota, but not from Rossini (that I came across here). (Colin Anderson)

Anneleen Lenaerts NINO ROTA Works for Harp

On March 29, Anneleen Lenaerts released her sixth album, highlighting the works of Nino Rota and featuring Emmanuel Pahud on flute and Adrien Perruchon conducting the Brussels Philharmonic. In addition to Rota’s harp concerto, the Sarabanda e Toccata, and his flute and harp sonata, Lenaerts performs music from his films such as The Godfather and Taming of the Shrew. “Nino Rota is such a special composer, mainly known to the audience for his film music for movies like The Godfather, Dolce Vita, and Romeo and Juliet,” Lenaerts says. “But before he got famous doing this, he had written so many beautiful classical pieces that are not as well–known as they should be. People usually don’t know that he wrote many concerti, operas, ballets, even an oratorio and chamber music.” When asked what she enjoys most about his music, she references his classical works, saying, “It’s as if he always takes you on a trip full of images and true emotions. Even without a movie you can picture a story to it.”

Ödön Rácz MY DOUBLE BASS

Ödön Rácz was born in Budapest on 6 September 1981 and began to learn to play the double bass at the tender age of nine.
He continued his studies at the St. Stephan Music Conservatory with Gergely Járdányi, a student of Ludwig Streicher.
In 2001 he transferred to the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna where he was accepted into the class of Alois Posch.
Following a successful audition, Ödön Rácz joined the double bass group of the Vienna State Opera Orchestra on 1 September 2004. He has been double bass soloist with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Vienna State Opera Orchestra since 2009.
The latest album from Ödön Rácz, My Double Bass showcases the eponymous instrument’s strengths and versatility in music spanning continents from Bottesini, Piazzolla, and Rota. Rácz collaborates with Noah Bendix-Balgley, the American violinist and present concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic, alongside the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra under the baton of Speranza Scappucci, the general music director of the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Liège.

Antonio Salguero / Pedro Gavilán CLARINET SONATAS 20th CENTURY

A journey through the most important sonatas written in the 20th century with the clarinet as the protagonist, by five great composers. The Argentine composer Carlos Guastavino (1912-2000) proposes us in his Sonata for clarinet and piano a neoclassical atmosphere in the clear formal definition of his themes and in a certain harmonic freedom, yet he offers a more scholastic work, more solid and resounding that is already clearly evident from the beginning of the work: in the underlying sonata form of the first movement, Allegro deciso. This CD includes a final perspective of the neoclassical conceptual model, offered by the Austrian (later an English citizen) composer and conductor Joseph Horovitz (1926) in his Sonatina for clarinet and piano composed in 1981. Quiet, as if emerging from a dim light, Sonata en re by Nino Rota (1911-1979), composed in 1945, comes to us to finally offer us a musical image brimming with Mediterranean light. Kindness, beauty, simplicity and pleasant repose merge into a piece of scholastic organization in which solid formal structures guarantee the listening and understanding of a fundamentally melodic discourse, always well articulated. Sonata for clarinet and piano by Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), how much tenderness enclosed in the beautiful notes of this score! An irrepressible need to listen carefully, once again, the slow section of the first movement invades all of us who know the work, but its beauty is not only collected in that fantastic moment of 16 bars in which it seems to come together in the most delicate moments of Maurice Ravel’s String Quartet or of Pavane pour une infante défunte by the same author, the simple and naive way of these notes, full of grace, in the Renaissance sense of the word: “as if it was not difficult to write this passage “. A different world, despite the proximity in time, is what Edison Denissow (1929-1996) offers us in his Sonata for clarinet, composed in 1972. We have reserved for the end the comment of the penultimate work of this album this piece which is a very successful work that collects innumerable possibilities of expression of the clarinet, far from those exhibited in the rest of the chosen pieces. Glissandi, quarters of tone, frullati, trills, tremolos, etc.

Polina Osetinskaya ROTA - DESYATNIKOV

This disc of pieces played by the pianist Polina Osetinskaya brings together the music of Giovanni (“Nino”) Rota and Leonid Desyatnikov. An odd combination? – actually, no, Rota (1911-1979) lived entirely in the 20th century; Desyatnikov was born in 1955; but what these composers have in common is not just the century they lived in but the way their work challenges what academic music had become. Neither Rota nor Desyatnikov has ever been part of any musical movement and they have written no theoretical tracts, as was all the rage in the 20th century but we can still see their music as a riposte to contemporary isolationism, arrogance and fear of the listener.

At the conservatoire in Rome the student Rota was groomed to become the next Puccini. At the age of 12 this wunderkind wrote an oratorio which was instantly performed in Rome and Paris but by the middle of the 20th century, with the triumphant avant garde on one side and bloodless traditionalism on the other, there was no place for a second Puccini and Rota’s ten operas (the first written in 1942, the last in 1977) were always overshadowed by his film music. Rota was arguably the most important film composer of the 20th century, Federico Fellini’s friend and in many ways his co-author.

Like Nino Rota, Leonid Desyatnikov has a comprehensive list of works in traditional forms to his credit: symphonies, operas, ballets. In his early days the composer worked in a number of different theatres in Leningrad and beyond. Later he reworked several of these scores as a piano cycle, which is how his concert suite Echoes of the Theatre came about. Here, eccentrically but with a certain artistic inevitability, he brought together music from puppet shows, a vaudeville for Conservatoire students, a cartoon and motifs from the songs of Vertinsky and Efim Rosenfeld.

The waltz In honour of Dickens was created from music written for the Leningrad Youth Theatre play The Cricket on the Hearth. Titry is from the soundtrack to Valery Todorovsky’s film Moscow Nights. Nocturne comes from Alexei Uchitel’s film Giselle Obsession. Happiness is the only solo piano number from Alexandr Zeldovich’s film The Target. Albumblatt was written for the birthday of Yulia Volk-Boreiko, wife of the conductor Andrei Boreiko.

This disc demonstrates that Stravinsky’s famous dictum – “Film music exists only to enrich the composer” – was really just an idle slander. Actually, even Stravinsky’s own greatest compositions exist in genres which before Tchaikovsky, were considered merely decorative. After Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky nobody ever again spoke in a derogatory way about ballet music, for example.

In one way at least Rota and Desyatnikov are both like Stravinsky – their music can stand perfectly well on its own and in Desyatnikov’s case it always surpasses the genre it was born from.