Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco - Guitar Chamber Music (Duilio Meucci; etc.)

Information

Composer: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

• Quintet for Guitar & Strings, Op. 143
• Aria, Op. 146a (transcr. Francesco Venga for Guitar, Flute & Viola)
• Sonatina for Flute & Guitar, Op. 205
• Fantasia for Guitar & Piano, Op. 145
• Fuga elegiaca, Op. 210a
• Appunti, preludi e studi, Op. 210, Libro 1: No. 2, Melodia senza accompagnamento "Una preghiera"

Duilio Meucci, guitar

Vincenzo Meriani, violin

Antonella D'Andrea, violin

Francesco Venga, viola

Matteo Parisi, cello

Marco Salvio, flute

Marina Pellegrino, piano

Pietro Locatto, guitar

Date: 2021

Label: Stradivarius

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Description

A monograph on the chamber music for guitar by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco is not a new operation, nor is it particularly original: the numbers of works that the Maestro be-queathed to the six strings significantly occupy the entire last season of the Florentine composer’s life and work. It was evident in his perception that “chamber music would be the salvation of the classical guitar”. However, this disc is not born from a compiling ur-gency, from a need to combine a catalog and observe it with fetishism in its entirety, - after all, there are many chamber pieces missing from the entire corpus, not to mention the vocal chamber music and the music for two guitars, here only partially addressed. Rather, from the desire to contemplate in a different perspective some elements of a rich legacy that still today stimulates and fascinates the interpreters who approach it. The title “Appunti” (Notes) is anything but casual, as are the works chosen to represent it. In recounting this repertoire, my will - with the help of a homogeneous time span going from 1950 to the last days of the Maestro’s life - has been to highlight the possibilities of salvation that the guitar assumes through chamber music, with compositional skills that can still be defined as exemplary acts of bravura and happy inspiration, unsurpassed to this day. As on a notebook, the notes collected take shape, and become the argument for possibilities, then become thesis, evidence, and, eventually, memory.

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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (3 April 1895 — 15 March 1968) was an Italian composer. A student of Ildebrando Pizzetti, he gained recognition in the 1920s but was forced to emigrate to the U.S. in 1939 due to Mussolini's anti-Semitic laws. Settling in Hollywood, he composed concertos for piano, violin, cello and guitar, and wrote overtures for 12 Shakespeare plays. He also set Shakespeare's poems and sonnets to music and composed two Shakespearean operas. Castelnuovo-Tedesco's chamber and piano works are noted for their symphonic scope, while his vocal music reflects the melodic tradition of the Italian school.

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Duilio Meucci is an Italian guitarist who studied under Angelo Gilardino and Dušan Bogdanović at the Haute école de musique de Genève. Since his 2008 recording debut, he has cultivated an eclectic solo repertoire, along with chamber music and improvisation. He has performed with artists like Tommaso Lonquich and ensembles such as OEOAS, and debuted in orchestral performance in 2013. Meucci is the dedicatee of works by Gilardino and Bogdanović, featured on his album Pièces Intimes. He won the 2021 Chitarra d'Oro for Best Video and lectured at the 2023 Guitar Foundation of America convention. He records with Naxos.

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