Ottorino Respighi - Concerto gregoriano; Concerto all'antica (Andrea Cappelletti)

Information

Composer: Ottorino Respighi

• Concerto gregoriano
• Concerto all'antica

Andrea Cappelletti, violin

Philharmonia Orchestra

Matthias Bamert, conductor

Date: 1993

Label: Koch Schwann

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Review

Cappelletti's and Bamert's coupling is fascinating and salutary in demonstrating how little there remains to apologize for in the best of Respighi's music when it is played with real opulence and virtuosity. The fact that the Concerto gregoriano somewhat belies its name seems hardly worth making a fuss over when both soloist and conductor have so shrewdly and delightedly perceived that Respighi's use of modality enables him to explore both 'early music' and folklore, and thus in the first movement to come within hand-clasping distance of Vaughan Williams, in the finale to give a wave to Dvorak. The lushness of the music, which can be disconcerting if you're expecting 'real' Gregorian chant, sounds much more natural when put into its proper, late-romantic-violin-concerto context by a big and bold performance and by rich and dramatic gesture. Cappelletti, a striking and accomplished soloist (he plays, by the way, a sumptuous late Stradivari) has all the variety of tone to make the most of the finale's punch and vigour, but also of the musing beauty of the slow movement. Bamert, one of whose most praiseworthy gifts (vide his Parry cycle for Chandos) is the ability to capture a composer's individual tone of voice, is an ideal partner. I now prefer this reading to Lydia Mordkovitch's beautiful but rather more reticent account. As for the rather more slender Concerto all'antica, Cappelletti and Bamert can't quite hide the finale's garrulousness (though one hardly minds it, with such refined playing as this), but their wholehearted enjoyment of the work's blend of neo-classical gesture and romantic warmth is again infectious.

— Michael Oliver

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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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