Nino Sevilha

Seventh album from Carlos Niño, the Los Angeles polymath, enlists trusted friends to mould another astral, Afro-futuristic suite of unrelenting beauty which teeters at the edge of New Age and spiritual jazz.

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.

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.

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).