Romeo And Juliet Nino Rota

With the exception of the title cut on the first album, Those Were The Days (which is given a rather stodgy treatment), this CD is vintage Percy Faith. The second LP, Love Theme from Romeo and Juliet, came out in 1969, when Faith's new sound of orchestra with female chorus had just hit its stride. The trademark harpsichord is there, too. I had this album on LP when I was eight years old, and am pleased to discover that it is absolutely delightful all these years later. The two tunes from Hair are highlights of the album, brimming with energy and delicacy at the same time. Faith also commemorates the tenth anniversary of his big instrumental hit, Theme from A Summer Place, by writing a new version with female chorus. It doesn't displace memories of the original, but it is a welcome piece on this album. If you like your '60's music in a form that is evergreen, this Percy Faith CD is for you.
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As Anneleen Lenaerts proves, Nino Rota brought the same gifts to his music for harp as he did to such unforgettable film scores as The Godfather, La dolce vita and Romeo and Juliet. “What could be better than to sweep an audience away and give them a moment of pure joy?” she asks. “For me, that is Nino Rota’s most important musical message.

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.