Here are two Casella concertos
that will have escaped all but the most assiduous devotees
of the composer. They both derive from his so-called “Third
Period” of compositional development, a very amorphous categorisation
that rather fails to get to grips with stylistic specifics.
The earlier of the two,
the Violin Concerto, is an easygoing work dedicated
to and first performed by Josef Szigeti. He mentions the
performance in his autobiography but is otherwise silent
about either the work or its reception. Louis Krasner played
it. And another violinist who propagandised for the concerto
is Ida Haendel who played it with Celibidache. She’s a lot
more voluble about it and its attendant difficulties, which
perhaps I can summarise as a problem regarding thematically
similar material returning saddled with different resolutions.
One wrong note and the soloist would go haywire. Haendel
admits that it made for difficulties in memorising. Unfortunately
neither Szigeti nor Haendel left behind recordings but another
splendid musician, André Gertler did, though it’s not one
to which I’ve had access.
As a work it’s a really
neo-romantic pleaser with modified Stravinskian touches.
It opens like The Lark Ascending but settles down
to add a dash of rhythmic verve and variety. The thematic
recurrences are part of a structural consonance and add a
formal control over sometimes slightly-too-leisurely writing.
The slow movement though is gorgeously lyrical and redolent
at times of Italian folk-influenced song, though Casella
is at pains to contrast the outer liquidity with a central
section of more boisterous action. In spirit if not detail
one feels Casella turning to the slow moving of Ravel’s Piano
Concerto for inspiration. The marching rondo finale does
sound, in its more restful moments, like a prefiguring of
Finzi.
The Triple Concerto Op.56
followed five years later. It was written for the trio of
which Casella was the pianist, the Trio Italiano, whose other
members were Alberto Poltronieri and
Arturo Bonucci. A private recording of the trio performing
this with Koussevitsky in Boston in 1936 does exist. The
trio bearing Poltronieri’s name recorded it commercially
and there has certainly been at least one more recent, currently
unavailable,
recording.
Naturally
it was written for Casella’s own trio. Opening solemnly it’s
written in frankly concerto grosso form, harking back to
the kind of Italian eighteenth century style of which Casella
was so convinced an exponent and revivifier. There are plenty
of stalking figures passed around from basses to brass to
winds. There’s some acerbity here but in the main Casella’s
trademark lyricism takes prominence. The slow movement is
harmonically more complex with the kind of statuesque tune
once more redolent of Ravel. Yet again he contrasts this
with a vivid terpsichorean section that flirts with tangy
dance affiliations. The finale is vigorous and gigue-like.
It employs the contrasting scheme that runs throughout, framing
the trio against the orchestra. It does actually reach quite
bucolic heights, the most florid of the six movements in
this enterprising disc.
Capriccio’s
SACD set-up sounds, though I played it on a conventional
system, full of a bloom that doesn’t stint detail. The performances
are accomplished and sure-footed even if none of the soloists
is the ultimate in characterful individualists. The documentation
is perfectly adequate and helpful. Neither work necessarily
adds much to the lifeblood of concerto literature but they
do plough previously under-tilled soil as far as the catalogues
are concerned.
Jonathan
Woolf
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Matthias Wollong
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[59:21] 
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