Alfredo Casella composed his Concerto for Orchestra in 1937 for the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and Willem Mengelberg. At the time, there were very few works around bearing that title; the most famous was probably Hindemith’s brief essay in the form, and the neo-baroque energy of Casella’s work recalls Hindemith’s work, although this piece is typically sunnier, more lyrical, and considerably more traditionally melodic. The music is nevertheless extremely brilliant and wonderfully enjoyable; the sound clip below offers a tiny taste of the opening of the finale. Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic play the work with plenty of fire and drive in this premiere recording; why it’s not a repertory item is completely beyond imagining.

A notte alta (“In Deepest Night”) is a tone poem for piano and orchestra whose closest analogue might be Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, or something similar. The music had personal significance for the composer, and supposedly reflects his emotional response to an abortive love affair in the early years of the 20th century. The music is certainly evocative, impressionistic, nocturnal, mysterious, sensual, and all of that. This is the work’s second recording, the first being part of Naxos’ excellent Casella orchestral music series; this version is a couple of minutes quicker, but both are beautifully done and equally compelling. The Naxos comes with that label’s slightly finer version of the Second Symphony, and I don’t mind having both.

The Symphonic Fragments from the opera La donna serpent are witty, exotic, and very colorfully scored. The story is a Goldoni comedy that also furnished the story for Wagner’s Die Feen, and the only problem with these fragments is that they are indeed a bit, well, fragmentary. No qualms at all, though, about the performance, which is brilliant, and like everything on the disc very well engineered. Casella remains one of the few unquestionably great 20th-century composers who has yet to earn the acclaim he deserves. You owe it to yourself to get to know him.

-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Casella was, if it isn’t a contradiction in terms, a kind of neoclassical Romantic; of sufficient pianistic skill that he was admitted to the Paris Conservatoire at the age of 13 and thus perhaps escaped from the pressure to plough the furrow of operatic verismo already so well tilled by his countrymen. Instead he made his mark as a composer of abstract, instrumental music such as these two cello sonatas.

The First Sonata, like his other youthful compositions, reveals various stylistic influences: there are hints of Debussy, Mahler and Strauss, as well as traces of what Casella had learnt from Fauré. Even in these early works, however, the composer’s own personality comes across clearly in the search for what was new and hitherto unexplored ground. The Second Sonata reveals a change in compositional approach. In fact, it bears witness to his interest in a style that he defined as ‘baroque in its monumentality’. With its four movements it is more extensive, with dynamics based on deep contrasts between passages that are passionate and vigorous, and others in which the atmosphere is quietly intimate. The same rhythmic energy returns in the Tarantella, composed in 1929 along with the Notturno for violin and piano, transcribed by Luigi Silva in 1931, and ultimately reworked by Casella for cello and orchestra in 1934.

Andrea Favalessa and Maria Semeraro are young Italian musicians who regularly play together in a fruitful artistic partnership that has won them international recognition and numerous awards.

Other information:
- Recorded in 2013.
- The music of Alfredo Casella is experiencing a true revival: labels like Chandos and Naxos issue his large scale orchestral works to great critical and public acclaim, and this new recording presents his wonderful works for cello and piano.
- Casella’s musical language is often called “Neoclassical”: clear structures, open and strong melodic lines, vibrant and sharply edged rhythms, music of great vitality and power.
- The cello sonatas receive a passionate and convincing performance by two young Italians, Andrea Favalessa and Maria Semeraro, a duo already for many years, having won several international prizes at chamber music competitions.
- Booklet includes notes on the music by Maria Semeraro.

Alfredo Casella certainly was the most 'European' composer of the famous "eighties generation": he arrived in Paris as a piano student then as a concert artist, then he fully lived the varied cultural movement that filled the French capital in the early twentieth century where music, painting, dance and poetry represented the main trends of the continent. The songs for voice and piano constitute one of the most sensitive means of showing how Casella managed to deal with a culture that placed the m�lodie in the forefront, by surrounding it with the subtle reverberation emitted by the intertwining of music and poetry, over the background of a social custom that resounded with precious literary streaks. The voice of Lorna Windsor, accompanied by the piano by Raffaele Cortesi, reveals in all it's nuances these compositions, belonging to the period when Casella was staying in the stimulating cultural forge of a Paris at the top of it's social and artistic importance.

CASELLA Symphony No. 3. Italia. Introduzione, Corale e Marcia • Gianandrea Noseda, cond; BBC PO • CHANDOS 10768 (69:35)


Alfredo Casella’s Third Symphony of 1939–40 followed his Second after a gap of 31 years. Neither work was available on record until recently. It is only lately that we have been able to appreciate fully the achievements of this previously neglected composer, thanks largely to two ongoing series, from Francesco La Vecchia for Naxos and Gianadrea Noseda for Chandos. While La Vecchia’s recordings have been and continue to be excellent, it is Noseda and his BBC forces who really shine, with, it must be admitted, considerable help from the Chandos recording team. Noseda’s recording of Casella’s Second Symphony revealed it to be a work of Mahlerian scope and impressive technical assurance (see Paul A. Snook’s review in Fanfare 34:2), and in this new release the conductor makes an even more convincing case for the Third.


It is a work of vast proportions, lasting 42 minutes in this performance. The first movement expands from an initial pastoral theme played by a solo oboe, and Casella develops his material with a rigor reminiscent of Hindemith. The emotional center of the work is the slow movement, which again proceeds with an inevitability that signifies the composer’s long experience. The fourth movement finale is the most episodic, concluding with a return to the opening material that strengthens the structure of the work as a whole. The third movement scherzo takes the form of a sardonic interlude. In the past I felt this movement was overlong, as the material is mostly repeated in changing orchestral garb but not developed in any significant way. Noseda’s performance makes it work by the careful contrasting of dynamics: the first part of the movement is robust and primarily forte , whereas the quieter second part is like an extended, ghostly echo of the first. This is very clear in the new recording.


Noseda and Chandos pull out all stops for the early tone poem Italia , written to be Casella’s answer to Respighi’s popular Roman trilogy and to Richard Strauss’s Aus Italien . Like Strauss, Casella makes use of Danza’s tune Funiculi-Funiculà (in Casella’s case with the composer’s permission) and treats it in an exciting, freewheeling way. Strangely enough, it is this specific musical reference that dates the work. Funiculi-Funiculà conjures up the ethos of Dean Martin (or even Chico Marx’s comic character) that Americans once associated with Italy but of course no longer do. In a performance as colorful as Noseda’s, any such period flavor is not the drawback it might be in less committed hands.


The Introduzione, Corale e Marcia for woodwind, brass, timpani, percussion, piano, and double basses is another late piece, dating from 1935 when Stravinsky’s neoclassicism was a predominant influence on Casella. While just under eight minutes in total length, it is a strong work, cleanly scored and tightly organized. Again, the forces on the new disc make a compelling case for the piece. According to the CD cover, this is its premiere recording.


La Vecchia recently got around to the Third Symphony in his Naxos series, a version that I regret to say I have not heard. It would have to be very special to equal Noseda. (Raymond Tuttle in these pages called La Vecchia’s performance “completely satisfactory” but had some reservations about the symphony itself; see Fanfare 35:2.) Back in January 2010 ( Fanfare 33:3), Paul A. Snook and I reviewed another recording of the symphony and Italia by the WDR SO Köln, conducted by Alun Francis. We both liked it, and indeed it is a classy, well-recorded performance. Francis stresses the Symphony’s neoclassical qualities, while Noseda makes more of the work’s orchestral panoply. Both versions are recommendable, but my preference falls slightly on the side of the new release because of the musicians’ energy and sensitivity, the brilliant Chandos sound, and the inclusion of the Introduzione, Corale e Marcia . This is a most welcome disc; so much so that it has earned a coveted place on my 2013 Want List.


FANFARE: Phillip Scott

Gianandrea Noseda’s Casella reappraisal for Chandos, among his most significant achievements to date, has radically shifted our perspectives on one of the finest if most neglected Italian composers of the post-Puccini generation.

Finicky about his own music, Casella dismissed the symphony as juvenile and the ballet – it was offered to Diaghilev, who rejected it – as derivative, though we might now question his judgement in both cases. Le couvent sur l’eau evokes Venice as a place of decaying, sinister beauty, with faded allusions to Baroque suites, a dark, post-Impressionist tinge in the scoring and a disembodied soprano voice weaving its way through its textures. The symphony, meanwhile, reveals its influences a bit too obviously in places but shows a powerful dramatic imagination at work. His mature ability to filter his influences through his imagination to create something utterly original, meanwhile, informs the Elegia, which blends Mahlerian anguish with Stravinskian rhythmic violence in a lament for an unknown soldier killed in the First World War. It’s a shattering work, one of his greatest.

The performances are exemplary. Noseda’s familiar combination of rigor and emotional extremism is in evidence throughout. The symphony seethes with tension and excitement, even in the lengthy finale where the material is occasionally repetitive. Highly recommended.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

This Blu-ray Disc is only playable on Blu-ray Disc players and not compatible with standard DVD players.

Also available on standard DVD

Alfredo Casella was one of the ‘Generation of the eighties’ who sought to shake Italian music from its longstanding operatic heritage and the dominance of Puccini. La donna serpente was Casella’s only full-scale opera, its fantastic plot based on Carlo Gozzi’s renowned fairy tale that perpetually alternates between tragedy and comedy, expressed in neo-Classical music that skillfully portrays the sinister and ethereal world of the fairies as well as the intense emotions of the human realm. This production was acclaimed for Arturo Cirillo’s dreamlike setting and Gianandrea Noseda’s pin-point conducting: ‘What energy, what precision! … he delivers the complexity of this score with a disconcerting ease.’ (resmusica.com)

-----

REVIEW:

In the leading role of Miranda, Carmela Remigio is one of today’s leading Italian sopranos in high demand in the world’s leading opera houses. Totally committed in an exacting role, she is partnered by the Sardinian tenor, Piero Pretti, who is often called upon to go into that upper stratosphere, the conclusion in a duet of sheer exultation. To bring the comedy to life, the Italian trio of Francesco Marsiglia, Marco Filippo Romano and Roberto de Candia are superb both vocally and characterisation.

– David's Review Corner (David Denton)

Casella: Piano Music

Inspired by Mahler and Strauss, the Italian composer Alfredo Casella created his multi-layered second symphony in Paris in 1908/09 - the highlight of his early work. With this work, he regained international recognition for the Italian symphony. At the age of 45, he also devoted himself to the music theater and composed the opera La Donna Serpente after a fairy tale by Carlo Gozzi.

By the time of the ‘Ottocento’ (19th century), opera was the dominant force in Italian musical culture, with bel canto composers such as Rossini and Donizetti creating a public appetite for opera that eclipsed achievements by Italy’s musical sons in other genres. Some of these composers who focused their energies instead on instrumental music, swimming against the operatic tide, remained in their native land, while others found a home (or were forced to find one) abroad.

Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909) is one who stayed. A gifted pianist, he bypassed the operatic path and wrote music with a kind of fluent synthesis of Italian lyricism and German, dialectic approach to form that reached an early peak in his Cello Sonata of 1880. Yet Martucci, as a teacher of composition in Bologna and then Naples, urged the teenaged Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) to study abroad.

Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968) is among the few composers in this set whose entire career centered in Italy, and he wrote a substantial body of instrumental music.

Before the war and eventual exile, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) succeeded in reinventing an essentially Romantic model (of both form and harmony) for his own time with his Cello Sonata Op. 50 of 1928.

From seven years earlier, Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Sonata of 1921 is a more gloomy, even tortured affair. The Cello Sonata of Francesco Cilea (1866-1950), while unmistakably cast as an ‘operatic’ work from its opening solo, features a protagonist scarcely burdened by the existential angst to be found in comparable works from northern Europe.

Like Cilea, Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876–1948) is known for his operas but unlike Cilea’s cello sonata, Wolf-Ferrari’s Op. 30 dates from the final three years of his life and belongs to a mature output of instrumental music.

Virtuoso cellists Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901) produced many trifles and showpieces to display his artistry to his adoring public in London. He was most proud of the set of six sonatas included in this set. In 1844 he made his first appearance in the English capital and soon settled there, playing both as a soloist and in one of the first celebrity string quartets.

The Cello Sonata by Mario Pilati (1903-1938) is another product of the fast-moving 1920s, formed in a Romantic tradition but inflected – like the music of Casella, Pizzetti, and Castelnuovo-Tedesco – by contemporary trends in impressionism and futurism.

From the next generation of composers, the Cello Sonata composed in 1948 by Eliodoro Sollim (1926-2000) fluently incorporates the kind of modal harmonies and cross-rhythms adopted by the likes of Bartók and Janáček from the folk traditions of their own cultures.

A cross-section of the Italian production for cello and piano, conceived during the hazy beginning of the twentieth century, shows us how the most varied influences – coming from all sorts of styles: Gregorian, Monteverdi, operatic, German and French late-romantic, avant-gardist, Franco-Russian impressionist, French symbolist, veristic – are absorbed and remoulded, accepted and rejected, by various personalities of the world of composition. In this cultural ambience, a crucial role was played by the so-called Generation of Eighteen-Eighty, whose components, Casella, Malipiero, Pizzetti, Respighi, friends and collaborators, stood out for their pursuit of innovation and their aim to create a character peculiar to Italian music; this quest was accompanied, at least in their artistic choices, by a certain lack of political commitment. Within this recording, cellist Roberto Trainini and pianist Stella Ala Luce Pontoriero are delivering an anthology of precious musical gems as necessary testimony to the great value of some obscured and forgotten Italian early twentieth century repertoire.

WORKS FOR PIANO & ORCHESTRA

A unique and imaginative collection newly recorded by a recent star of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition. Anna Geniushene’s fresh; layered; and powerful interpretations won her a worldwide following at the 2022 edition of the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition; where she took Silver Medal with a stunning account of Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto which the critic for Gramophone compared in its power and nuance to Van Cliburn himself.

Born in Moscow; Anna Geniushene pursued graduate studies in London and now lives in Lithuania with her husband; the pianist Lukas Geniusas. In her own booklet introduction; she explains the inspiration for this quirky collection of instrumental lullabies. The Berceuse is ‘associated with tenderness; care; purest love; and the most sensitive moments in our lives.’ She dedicates the album to her two young sons. Perhaps the most celebrated Berceuse of all; by Chopin; is missing; because it was Anna Geniushene’s particular wish to find and share neglected examples of the genre; even by well-known composers. Debussy composed the Berceuse heroique during the First World War as a tribute to the soldiers on the Western Front. The Berceuse Elegiaque of Busoni is better known in its orchestral guise. The brief Berceuse by Hindemith; unpublished in his lifetime; ‘draws listeners’ attention by its utterly eloquent and typically sarcastic character; which has nothing in common with traditional lullabies.’ The sheer diversity of composers makes for a continually varied sequence. George Crumb evokes a magical night-time stillness with a minimum of notes. Mompou’s Berceuse is likewise remarkable for its distilled serenity; whereas the examples by Granados; John Field and Liszt bring comfort with more Romantically moulded melodies in the tradition of Chopin. Anna Geniushene closes the album with two Russian Berceuses; by Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky; lyrical; simple and utterly beguiling in her hands.

Paul Klee’s picture Ad marginem provides inspiration and context for the present program and is a visual guide to performance for us as Talistrio: a radiant red circle in the middle, while around it - driven back to the margin - living creatures and abstract objects emerge. It is surely this mixture of melancholy and hope that links all the works listed below, be it Casella’s neoclassical dance on the volcano from the early 20th century, Tchaikovsky’s death and its shattering inspirational impulse upon the young Rachmaninoff, or the Japanese child scene at sunset. Amazement and admiration have attended Talistrio since its debut concert of 2012. The press credits the trio with “great intensity and virtuosity”, “great differentiation of tone”, and a “spiritual penetration of the compositions followed through to the slightest detail”.

Talistrio is the Augsburg piano trio that belongs to a new generation as an international ensemble. It was in 2011 that siblings Elisa and Wenzel Gummer joined cellist Takuro Okada to form a German-Japanese trio. Concert tours have since taken them from Bavaria to Holland, Switzerland and Japan. Talistrio sets great store by projects promoting exchange and understanding between the German and Japanese cultures.

From the very first notes, with their tolling bells, Casella’s Symphony No. 2 is deeply indebted to its model, Mahler’s own Symphony No. 2, whose Parisian première was championed by Casella during his years in the French capital. A notte alta (‘In deepest night’), which Casella described as ‘the only piece of programme music I have ever composed…inspired by emotional events in my personal life’ (Casella’s love for his Parisian student Yvonne Müller), is a work of intimate self-revelation and sombre meditation on ‘the utter indifference of Nature to human passions’.