First-ever compilation of his Atlantic Records recordings and featuring previously unissued live take on “Darn That Dream.”
Los Angeles staple Carlos Niño teams up with The Pyramids' Idris Ackamoor and guitarist/producer Nate Mercereau, cutting Ackamoor's free-spirited tenor wails with tempered new age percussion and celestial synths.
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.
Nino Rota’s reputation outside Italy as, at best, a civilised purveyor of minor theatre music is turning out to be hardly even a half-truth. BIS’s series of his symphonic and chamber works, and Chandos’s of the concertos, reveals a composer of incisive gifts and technical brilliance. Civilised the music certainly is, but often far more than that, its pervasive wit enhancing rather than detracting from the elegant suggestions of deep feeling. The wise and wily ‘neo-classicism’ of the Third Symphony sets out like an exercise in updated Mozart, but though Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony is brought to mind it soon becomes evident that a strain of acid melancholy undercuts the dapper phraseology. The model here, if there is one, seems more likely to be late Busoni, with disturbing cross-currents just beneath the surface. The Concerto festivo, more obviously a display piece, takes Italian opera genres (aria, cabaletta, etc) and reinterprets them in fairly irreverent orchestral terms, while the ballet music that Rota produced for the tercentenary of the death of Molière – almost his last work –insouciantly mixes Baroque, modern and popular styles, just as it mixes merriment and melancholy, with constant technical brilliance and utter lack of pomposity. The Swedish performers take to the Italianate gaiety as to the manner born. A delightful disc.
Seventeen-track anthology focuses mostly on their popular 1963-66 recordings, including "Deep Purple," "Whispering," "Stardust," "All Strung Out," several lower-charting items, and some LP tracks. They milked the "Deep Purple" formula too many times, but this is enjoyably frothy pop, and "All Strung Out" is a genuinely soulful, accurate approximation of Phil Spector's work with the Righteous Brothers. The disc also includes Stevens's 1959 solo single "Teach Me Tiger," a bizarre cover of "I Love How You Love Me" (with battling bagpipes and fuzzy guitars), and one undistinguished track each from 1985 and 1996.
This is a film recorded by the Radiotelevisione Italiana in 1956. The first thing that must be remarked is the first-class quality of both the sound and the picture for the standards of the time. Secondly, how young and how good were the singers. Rossana Carteri, who makes Susana , was only 26, while Marcella Pobbe and Luigi Alva, in the roles of the Comtess and Don Basilio, were 29 and Nicola Rossi Lemeni as Figaro 36. Having a Susana and a Comtess who are both both young and gorgeous makes quite credible the final scene in the garden where they exchange roles. Their duetto "Canzonetta Sull' Aria" is particularly enjoyable as well as the Comtess' "Dove Sono I Bei Momento", and Susana's "Deh, Vieni Non Tardar". Nicola Rossi Lemeni was one of the best Italian bassos in those times and he shows his abilities in the role of Figaro. The same can be said about the German basso-baritone Heinz Reifuss who makes a sensual Comte.