Alfredo Casella - Orchestral Music Vol. 2 (Gianandrea Noseda)

Information

Composer: Alfredo Casella

• Concerto for Orchestra, Op. 61
• A notte alta, Op. 30
• Symphonic Fragments from 'La donna serpente', Op. 50

Martin Roscoe, piano

BBC Philharmonic Orchestra

Gianandrea Noseda, conductor

Date: 2012

Label: Chandos

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Review

The music of Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) charts a fascinating stylistic journey. Early in his career he was a bold progressive well and truly under the spell of Mahler (whose Seventh Symphony he arranged for two pianos), Schoenberg and Stravinsky. You can hear all of this in the remarkable A notte alta (‘In Deepest Night’), originally conceived for solo piano and dating from 1917 (the present reworking for piano and orchestra was fashioned for an American tour four years later). With its deeply personal programme of two lovers clandestinely meeting at night (revealingly, the title-page bears a dedication to Yvonne Müller, a student with whom the composer was having an affair), it’s a moody, at times downright sinister soundscape, the dark-hued scoring reminiscent of, say, Roussel’s or Bax’s Second Symphonies, but more harmonically adventurous than either of those imposing masterworks (Casella himself is not afraid to embrace atonality).

The two purely orchestral offerings are entirely different again. First staged in 1932, Casella’s opera based on Carlo Gozzi’s dramatic fable La donna serpente (‘The Serpent Woman’) enjoyed only modest success. The composer promptly extracted two hugely colourful series of Symphonic Fragments from the opera. Readers with a fondness for Respighi and Pizzetti will enjoy themselves famously. And, from time to time, I also detected the influence of Busoni’s superb 1905 incidental music for Gozzi’s Turandot. Inspiration runs comparably high in the Concerto for Orchestra that Casella composed in 1937 for the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 50th anniversary and whose idiom now has rather more of a neo-classical flavour (Hindemith’s orchestral music from the same decade springs to mind).

Need I add that both performances and sound are absolutely out of the top drawer? Enthusiastically recommended. I look forward to future instalments.

— Andrew Achenbach

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Alfredo Casella (25 July 1883 – 5 March 1947) was an Italian composer, pianist and conductor. He studied in Paris under Louis Diémer and Gabriel Fauré before returning to Italy in 1914 to teach at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome. From 1927 to 1929, he served as principal conductor of the Boston Pops. Casella played a key role in reviving interest in Antonio Vivaldi's music, notably through organizing the 1939 Vivaldi Week. A major figure in the Neoclassical revival, his own compositions were deeply influenced by earlier Italian music. His notable works include La Giara, Paganiniana, and concertos for various instruments.

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Gianandrea Noseda (born 23 April 1964) is an Italian conductor. He graduated from the Milan Conservatory and furthered his conducting studies with Donato Renzetti, Myung-Whun Chung and Valery Gergiev. Noseda is currently the music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.; Generalmusikdirektor of Zurich Opera; principal guest conductor of the London Symphony; and the music director of the Tsinandali Festival in Georgia. He was also Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic from 2002 to 2011, and has conducted many recordings for the Chandos label.

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