Ottorino Respighi - Chamber Works (The Ambache)

Information

Composer: Ottorino Respighi

• Piano Quintet in F minor
• String Quartet in D minor
• Six Pieces for violin and piano

The Ambache

    Marcia Crayford, violin

    Ruth Ehrlich, violin

    Martin Outram, viola

    Judith Herbert, cello

    Diana Ambache, piano

Date: 2001

Label: Chandos

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Review

Like most of us, I am sure, knowledge of Ottorino Respighi’s music is probably restricted to the Roman tone poems, Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome, and Roman Festivals. He was a fine orchestrator, and rather trapped into pastiche arrangements of the works of his greater predecessors like Bach. Strangely, I came across him when writing my biography of Max Bruch, for, like Vaughan Williams, Respighi was an unlikely pupil of the old man when he was Professor of Composition at the Berlin Academy from 1890-1911. Bruch would have approved of Respighi (he castigated VW for his use of the flattened seventh, and luckily the Englishman ignored his teacher’s advice to stop using it for it became his trademark for the rest of his life!) because the Italian had an obvious respect for and assimilation of the past in his own music. Even Rachmaninov deferred to Respighi when he entrusted the orchestration of five of his Etudes-tableaux for piano ‘to your masterly hands’. He is due for rediscovery, or maybe it is more basic than that, discovery.

This disc goes some way to doing just that. The music is a surprising revelation, very delightful, tuneful, and imaginative. The Presto of the string quartet had me reaching for the skip-back button. All the works cover the first decade of the last century, when the composer was in his thirties, the Brahms influence still strong yet not without the sunny southern Italian climes of Respighi’s own nature, at the same time, Janus-like, looking ahead to what would happen in the first two decades of the 20th century, monumental times for music. Add in some Rimsky-Korsakov (another brilliant colourist), a dash of Mendelssohn, and some Richard Strauss and you have pretty well got an idea of how attractive this music is. Apparently there’s a lot more undiscovered chamber music to be explored, so the auguries are good.

The Ambache, an eminent group of five on this disc, play it all superbly well, the crowning duo of Ambache and Crayford in the beautiful Six Pieces rounding off a highly enjoyable feast of unfamiliar music.

— Christopher Fifield

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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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Diana Ambache (born 1948) began playing piano at age five and found her passion in ensemble performance. She founded the Ambache Chamber Orchestra in 1984 and ran it for 24 years, performing and recording much of Mozart's work. Her discovery of a Piano Concerto by Germaine Tailleferre in 1985 led to decades of research and advocacy for music by women composers. She has recorded multiple CDs, given many premières, and broadcast extensively for BBC Radio and Classic FM. Internationally toured with oboist Jeremy Polmear, she also led creativity workshops and lectured on European music festivals..

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