Malipiero

The art of Shakespeare was a recurring fascination for Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. In addition to two operas and numerous settings of songs and sonnets, he wrote 11 Shakespeare Overtures which here receive their first ever complete recording. Deploying all the resources of the symphony orchestra, these are some of the twentieth century’s most dramatic and tuneful orchestral works, spectacular evocations of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.

Starting from our common passion for Italian instrumental music of the early twentieth century, we, Chiara Burattini and Umberto Jacopo Laureti, declare that we have composed a picture (as varied as possible) around the two key figures of the world of piano (Busoni) and cello (Mainardi) of the time. From the Kultaselle variations (a youthful page, dense and full of passion) and from Busoni's seraphic Albumblatt, we passed through the Art Nouveau drawings of the Wolf-Ferrari Sonata and the Two Album Pages of Alaleona, ending with the Malipiero Sonatines and by Mainardi (the latter, together with the songs by Alaleona, in the very first recording).

Composer, pianist, orchestral director, essayist, organiser, Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) was a unique presence In the whole history of Italian music, to which the figure of what the French would call the homme-orchestre (as for Pierre Boulez, for example), has always been extraneous. Apart from himself, it was only Bruno Maderna, literary activity notwithstanding, who could move with so much artistic tension and plurality in his commitment: for both of these to write, to perform one's own music or that of others (for Casella in the double garb of pianist and conductor), to organise public events, to promote festivals, was part of a precise project.

from the CD booklet

This anthology is a kind of ship's log of my long research, born of a passion for futurism. Now that the twentieth century has become the previous century, the ideas of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti enjoy more than ever a propulsive energy that furthered the many movements throughout Europe that constituted the historical avant-garde.
The pieces that make up this anthology are highly diverse: transgression and contamination, rumorismo (noiseism), hyperexpressive states of the soul, rhythmic heightening, but all of them share a need for modernization, for anticonformity, for courageous experimentation.

Daniele Lombardi from the attached booket