Nino Rota: Sinfonia Sopra Una Canzone D'amore

Inspired by the works of Italian medieval writer/poet Boccaccio (the Decameron), Federico Fellini, Luchino Visconti, and Vittorio de Sica each directed a short starring Anita Ekberg, Romy Schneider, and Sophia Loren, respectively; Italian soundtrack heavyweights Nino Rota and Armando Trovajoli provided the necessary musical accompaniment. The result was the film Boccaccio 70 and music that frames a kaleidoscope of styles with dramatic panache. Trovajoli, in particular, mixes it up with cha-cha-chas, march pieces, waltzes, circus themes, and jazz – the highlight, though, is his Latin vocal feature, "Soldi! Soldi! Soldi!," sung by a surprisingly effective Loren. Unlike Trovajoli, Rota doesn't focus on one style per piece, but instead fills his symphonic-worthy sides with a seamless blend of many of the same styles, peppering the landscape with trademark doses of pipe-organ moodiness, can-can rhythms, and dusky string passages. And as far as jazz goes, Rota furnishes the Visconti segment with some very worthy combo ballads redolent of Miles Davis' own soundtrack venture, Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud.

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).

Only months after ASV's selection of chamber music by Nino Rota, which I reviewed in the May issue, here is another disc to prove that his output was not restricted to his highly effective film scores. This one is by an expert Milanese group, newly formed by the pianist Massimo Palumbo. Its programme overlaps with ASV's in the two postwar trios; at slightly slower speeds, Chandos's Ensemble Nino Rota gets rather more out of these essays in very mild modernism than ASV's Ex Novo Ensemble.

The concert works of film composer Nino Rota, best known for his scores for the Godfather trilogy and for a long series of films by Federico Fellini, have increasingly often been finding space in classical recording catalogs. Here's a nicely recorded rendering of Rota's two numbered symphonies, virtually unknown until perhaps the turn of the century, issued on a major British label, Chandos. Both are attractive pieces that could be profitably programmed by any symphony orchestra. They were composed in the 1930s, when Rota was as much American as Italian; he won a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and studied there for several years. Both reflect the French neo-classic trends that flourished in the U.S. between the wars, and, although Rota sounds nothing like Copland, you do experience in these works an evocation of what annotator Michele Rene Mannucci aptly calls "landscape in sound." Each work is in the conventional four movements, with a slow movement placed second in the Symphony No. 1 in G major and third in the Symphony No. 2 in F major.