Ottorino Respighi - The Birds; Botticelli Pictures; Suite in G (Salvatore Di Vittorio)

Information

Composer: Ottorino Respighi

• Serenata, P. 54
• Trittico botticelliano, P. 151
• Gli uccelli (The Birds), P. 154
• Suite for organ and strings in G major, P. 58 (original version)

Kyler Brown, organ

Chamber Orchestra of New York

Salvatore Di Vittorio, conductor

Date: 2013

Label: Naxos

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Review

This recording of the Three Botticelli Pictures has got to be the most texturally detailed, luminous, substantial performance yet captured on disc. Conductor Salvatore Di Vittorio makes sure that every strand of Respighi’s remarkable orchestration stands out in high relief, from the shockingly vivid violin trills at the start of “Spring” to the gently pulsating but constantly shifting motion of the waves in “The Birth of Venus”. It’s an amazing achievement, one that elevates a work all too easily dismissed as a sugary-sweet musical bon-bon. You can’t help but be impressed.

The Birds is equally well played and lovingly shaped by Di Vittorio and his band. Musically speaking the piece employs fewer glitzy effects, and so there are fewer coloristic surprises than we find in the Botticelli Pictures; but this is still a strikingly vivid rendering of this charming suite. Di Vittorio puts special emphasis on the programatic element: the squawking hens, the chirping cuckoo, or the smooth cooing of the nightingale, all effectively superimposed on Respighi’s stylized arrangements of earlier music. As with the Botticelli Pictures, the performance offers a rewarding experience if you really pay attention to what is going on in the music. There’s more than you might have thought. The brief (four-minute) Serenata for chamber orchestra that opens the program makes an absolutely delightful curtain-raiser to the two major works that follow.

Finally, this purports to be the world-premiere recording of the Suite in G major for strings and organ in its original, longer version. Sad to say, this is not major Respighi. Lasting slightly more than 20 minutes and containing four mostly slow movements, the piece is rather dull, even with Kyler Brown doing his best with the organ part. As so often happens when the organ is combined with an ensemble, there are some issues of focus and perspective that the engineers haven’t quite solved, and the strings in this context sound somewhat scrappy at the start–it could be a trick of the acoustic.

Still, the piece certainly is pleasant enough, and for the superb performances of the other two works this disc is well worth hearing. For this reason, I leave the organ suite out of the overall rating.

— David Hurwitz

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Ottorino Respighi (9 July 1879 – 18 April 1936) was an Italian composer, violinist, teacher, and musicologist and one of the leading Italian composers of the early 20th century. He studied at the Liceo Musicale di Bologna, and also studied briefly with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. His compositions range over operas, ballets, orchestral suites, choral songs, chamber music, and transcriptions of Italian compositions of the 16th–18th centuries, but his best known and most performed works are his three orchestral tone poems which brought him international fame: Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924), and Roman Festivals (1928).

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Salvatore Di Vittorio (born 22 October 1967 in Palermo) is an Italian composer and conductor. He studied composition and conducting in New York and Italy. Known for his lyrical orchestral poems, he has been commissioned by major orchestras including the London Philharmonic, Detroit Symphony and Teatro alla Scala. In 2008, he was entrusted by Ottorino Respighi's family to restore and complete several of the composer's early works, notably the first violin concerto. As Music Director of the Chamber Orchestra of New York, Di Vittorio has gained international recognition through his performances and recordings for Naxos.

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