Nino Rota

It's great to see the music of Nino Rota getting so much attention. He was a wonderful composer, and the ballet suite from La strada may be his orchestral masterpiece (just a quick note: the French language title identifies this as a suite from the eponymous film; it is in fact the more familiar arrangement of the later ballet). There are now four competitive recordings of this piece, the least interesting of which is on Chandos with the Teatro Massimo orchestra: not bad, but not as well played or recorded as either Muti's slightly stiff version with the excellent La Scala forces, or Atma's brilliant recent release featuring the Greater Montréal Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra under Yannick Nézet-Séguin. All of the couplings differ in various ways, though Muti also has the dances from Il gattopardo (The Leopard).

Famed for his inspired work with director Federico Fellini, Nino Rota was one of the most prolific and acclaimed film composers of his era, with a list of soundtrack credits ranging from La Dolce Vita to Franco Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet to Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather. Born December 3, 1911 in Milan. Italy, Rota was a child prodigy who had already written an opera and an oratorio prior to his fifteenth birthday; he subsequently studied at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia as well as the Liceo Musicale in Bari, where from 1950 to 1978 he served as director. In 1933 Rota first entered the Italian film industry, scoring the "white telephone" romances and musicals prevalent during the era; before 1950, he composed the music for some 30 features, as well as the operas Torquemada and The Florentine Straw Hat………

All Music Guide

The abundant concert works of Italian composer Nino Rota continue to surface in recordings, many on major labels. Doubtless this is partly because Rota carries marquee value from his association with the Godfather films, but his music, although surely a mixed bag, is often just plain fun. You can break it down into three general categories, which don't necessarily correspond to individual works but are heard in combination. First is the group of marvelously cinematic tunes that make this release of interest to the still-numerous fans of Rota's film music; the Concerto Soirée for piano and orchestra offers a generous selection.

Nino Rota was not only the man who wrote film scores for Fellini (La strada etc), René Clément and King Vidor. He was also a twentieth-century great composer. A child prodigy, he studied in America with Fritz Reiner, crossed paths with Toscanini, Igor Stravinsky and many others. Éric Le Sage, Emmanuel Pahud, Paul Meyer, Daishin Kashimoto, Aurélien Pascal and their partners from the Salon de Provence festival pay tribute to his music with the Piccola Offerta Musicale (Little Musical Offering), composed in 1943 at the age of twenty-two, alongside a Nonet and a Trio for flute, violin and piano, both written in the late 1950s. The Trio for clarinet, cello and piano (1973) comes from Rota’s last creative period and has all the characteristics of his mature works.