Malipiero

No time of day has presumably been set to music more often than the nighttime. On this album violinist Elena Denisova and pianist Alexei Kornienko are featuring nocturnal works of the 20th and 21st century. Canto crepuscolare by Gian Francesco Malipiero, dating from 1908, is still a playful impressionist composition, while the Nocturne for violin and piano by John Cage (1947) rather revels the silence. A calm and melancholic vision is painted by Helmut Rogl’s Ein Traum zur halben Nacht (A Dream at Midnight, 1986), whereas Notturno (2007) by Michael Colina and Incubus, Fantasy for violin, piano and electronics (2020/21) by Alfred Huber depict the eerie and scary traits of nighttime. Like the work by Huber, Durch die Nacht (Through the Night) for violin and pre-recorded electroacoustics by Dieter Kaufmann (2020/21) as well as all the darkness we can hear – all the silence we can see (2020/21) by Oscar Jockel are world-premiere recordings.

Renata Tebaldi: The Birth of Legend
Classical | CD | MP3 192kbps | NO BOOKS NO COVERS | 107 MB
Fono FONO 1056 | Release Date: 2005

Renata Tebaldi (Pesaro, Italy, February 1, 1922 – San Marino, December 19, 2004) was an Italian lirico-spinto soprano, popular in the post-war period. Acclaimed as one of the most beloved opera singers of all time, she primarily focused on the verismo roles of the lyric and dramatic repertoires.

Alfredo Casella was an outstanding if uneven composer who led several of his contemporaries – Respighi, Malipiero, Pizzetti, and others – in a struggle to modernize Italian music. His interests as a composer and as an author of articles on music were highly cosmopolitan, as may be gathered from his early enthusiasms for Debussy, the Russian nationalists, Strauss, Bartók, and Schoenberg. Yet Casella was also intensely inspired by Italian culture, both its folkways and its Futurism movement.

As the notes to this welcome release make clear Stokowski had never conducted The Four Seasons before the Phase Four series of LPs of which this is so engaging an example. He, soloist Hugh Bean and the New Philharmonia went to the BBC’s Maida Vale studios and taped it for later broadcast (in the end it wasn’t until 1968 that it hit the airwaves), recording it the following day. The late Hugh Bean has recalled that it was in the can in one session – Stokowski remaining the professional to his batonless fingertips.

Works by the famous theorbo virtuoso Kapsberger have often been recorded, but little space has so far been given to repertoire drawn directly from manuscript sources. Kapsberger maintained a privileged relationship with his city of birth throughout his life. The Venice of Willaert, Gabrieli and Monteverdi, however, is not just a magnificent past: it is still alive today and continues its musical tradition in the so-called Second Venetian School of Malipiero, Maderna, Nono and whose most recent protagonist is Claudio Ambrosini (1948-), winner of the Prix de Rome and the Leone d'Oro at the Venice Biennale, whose works have already been recorded, among others, on the Kairos and Stradivarius labels. Kapsberger, Secret Pages reveals an astonishing instrumental challenge between lesser-known works by Kapsberger in which we admire ideas and creative intuition, and Ambrosini's unpublished works, which contain equal amount of creativity and unexpected possibilities for the instrument.

Scherchen was one of the leading conductors in the middle part of the twentieth century, especially valued for his pioneering performances of the contemporary music of his time. He was essentially self-taught as a musician and became a violist in the Blüthner Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic when he was 16. In 1911 he was an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg in the preparation of Pierrot Lunaire for performance.

Scherchen was one of the leading conductors in the middle part of the twentieth century, especially valued for his pioneering performances of the contemporary music of his time. He was essentially self-taught as a musician and became a violist in the Blüthner Orchestra and the Berlin Philharmonic when he was 16. In 1911 he was an assistant to Arnold Schoenberg in the preparation of Pierrot Lunaire for performance.

Recorded in Finland, in Järvenpää near Helsinki, this disc is a tribute to five extraordinary figures in Italian music: Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), Mario CastelnuovoTedesco (1895-1968), Luigi Dallapiccola (1904-1975), Giacinto Scelsi (1905-1988), and Nino Rota (1911-1979); five composers whose poetic universes, although very different from one another, are permeated by a common, intense expressiveness: the same trait that runs through the works featured here and that, like a fil rouge, has oriented Sanna Vaarni along his itinerary from 1916, the date of publication of Mario CastelnuovoTedesco’s Raggio verde, to 1964, the year of Nino Rota’s enchanting Preludi.