The series of Respighi
recordings which Geoffrey Simon made with the Philharmonia Orchestra
some fifteen years ago has rightly attracted a good deal of
praise and it is a pleasure to welcome this SACD reissue of
one of them. I haven’t, unfortunately, heard this reissue on
an SACD system, but can report myself thoroughly impressed with
the sound produced when played back on a conventional system
– vivid and powerful, with a strong sense of space, in which
individual instruments are sometimes very effectively highlighted,
but not at the cost of the larger orchestral sound.
The earliest work
here is the Suite for Strings and Organ, a piece of romanticised
Baroque which has real charm. The interplay of modern strings
and Bach-like organ in the Preludio will be a little
over-sweet for some tastes and would probably be bad for the
musical digestion if indulged in too often; the Aria which follows
is ravishingly lovely, a model of sensual sobriety and emotional
yearning – the music requires such oxymorons. The third movement,
marked Pastorale, creates an exquisite blend of gentle
organ and luminous strings – the orchestral playing and the
recording are heard at something like their best here; in the
final movement, Cantico, stately opening and closing
passages frame a more reflective central section. The whole
work is characterised both by elegance and by majesty, by lyricism
and by clarity of structure. Respighi’s particular mastery in
the creation of works which allude to, and to some degree imitate,
earlier musical idioms without ever being enslaved to them,
works which treat older music forms and languages with both
creative freedom and deep respect, can already be heard and
enjoyed in this relatively early and little-known work.
The Adagio with
Variations for Cello and Orchestra had its origins at much
the same time as the Suite, as a piece for cello and
piano, which Respighi revised and orchestrated in 1921, at the
suggestion of the Bolognese cellist, composer and art collector,
Antonio Certani. Indeed it is based on a theme by Certani –
see John France’s review of the Naxos
recording of the cello and piano version. It is a beautiful,
melancholy adagio, a rhapsody which avoid
excess and retains graceful balance. Alexander Baillie plays
it with quiet, undemonstrative subtlety, and Simon extracts
some beautiful sounds from the orchestra. As
with the Suite for Strings and Organ, one wonders why
we don’t hear it more often.
The piece which
is given most prominent billing on the CD cover, the Ballad
of the Gnomes (the Italian title is Ballata delle
gnomidi – and ‘ballata’ might as readily be translated as
‘Dance’ rather than ‘Ballad’) was written at much the same time
as the more famous tone poems The Fountains of Rome (1918)
and The Pines of Rome (1925). It was first performed
in Rome in April
1920; both Toscanini and Reiner conducted later performances
of the piece, though it was largely forgotten after that, until
Geoffrey Simon played it in 1992 with the Sacramento Orchestra.
It is a response to a strange – indeed perverse – poem by Carlo
Clausetti (1869-1943), better known as the director of Ricordi
- and a composer himself - rather than as a poet. His poem ‘The
Ballad of the Gnomes’, of which a free translation - but not
the original Italian - is provided in the booklet, is a rather
disturbing piece which (obliquely) narrates a tale in which
two female gnomes pick on a hapless male as part of some kind
of ritual and drag him to a darkened bedroom for some sort of
act of sexual predation, in the course of which he dies with
a “ghastly scream”. Other gnomes wait outside, as his scream
is succeeded by silence; at dawn the two she-gnomes carry his
bloodstained corpse to a cliff above the sea and throw it over,
amidst prayers which, we are told, sound more like curses. There
follows a frenzied dance, led by the two murderers, a kind of
Witches Sabbath. Such a scenario, it need hardly be said, offers
Respighi plenty of musical scope for lavish orchestral effects
and some driving rhythms. I’m not sure that the music ever amounts
to much more than an orchestral showpiece … and not an especially
glamorous one. There are some striking passages, but the whole
lacks musical coherence; the supposedly abandoned dance which
closes it sounds pretty tame alongside, say, The Rite of
Spring or The Miraculous Mandarin. Useful as it is
to have a vividly played and recorded performance available
- this was a première recording - this strikes me as actually
the least satisfying piece of music on the CD.
More familiar
than any of their companions on the CD, the three short pieces
which make up the Trittico boticelliano, the latest works
on the disc, surely capture much more of Respighi’s natural
sensibility. There is a delightful clarity to the orchestral
textures in these compositions for chamber orchestra – and to
their loving performance here. These are utterly delightful
pieces, delicate and subtle, quite without exaggeration or empty
rhetoric, beautiful examples of the art of musical ekphrasis.
They are ravishing responses to the exquisite visual textures
of three great paintings by Botticelli – La Primavera,
L’adorazione dei Magi and La nascita de Venere;
all now in the Uffizi in Florence. Botticelli’s pictures
are, if truth be told, much more than merely exquisite; each
of them is a work of serious religious and philosophical thought,
full of complex iconographical significance. Respighi’s music
makes no attempt to respond to that dimension of the paintings,
preferring to concentrate on their sheer fineness of detail
and to the finding of aural equivalents for their elusive colour-harmonies.
It would be churlish, though, in the face of such musical beauty,
to insist that finally the music sells the paintings short.
Perhaps that is what inevitably happens when great works of
art are translated from one medium to another? In any case,
these are lovely performances, quite wonderfully well recorded.
Glyn Pursglove
see also Review
by Jonathan Woolf
Leslie Pearson
(organ) 
[69:04]
