Written under the shadow of war, the first movement of Casella’s
third symphony begins - and ends - with an apparently simple
pastoral-type theme on the oboe. This soon expands into gritty
counterpoint. The second subject, too, steals in gently, almost
like a serenade. Here again, strenuous, hard-edged counterpoint,
helped on its way by some brassy fanfare figures, rapidly takes
over. How to balance all these elements? An early performance
under Harold Byrns - Rome RAI SO, 23 October 1954 - took a broad
view, timed at 12:26. The opening oboe pastoral has an air of
foreboding and the ensuing development has a craggy power and
conviction. Casella’s counterpoint is potentially noisy
and congested - British listeners might think of the first two
Rubbra symphonies. At Byrns’s spacious tempo it finds
time to register.
I don’t know how often RAI included this symphony in its
seasons. It turned up again in Turin on 9 June 1995. RAI’s
only surviving symphony orchestra, the RAI National Orchestra,
was conducted by Alun Francis. He shaved almost three minutes
off Byrns’s timing for this movement, coming in at 9:38.
His fundamental concerns seem to have been formal and textural
clarity. The symphonic argument is propelled with a firm hand
and the counterpoint becomes as little congested as the nature
of the scoring will allow. He makes the most of Casella’s
touches of colour - the role of the piano in the orchestra,
for example, is much more to the fore under his direction. According
to its own lights, his reading is a total success. However,
the music seems more of a major statement under Byrns. Francis
has also recorded the work for CPO, but I haven’t heard
this.
At 11:28, Francesco La Vecchia would seem closer to Byrns than
to Francis. This is not how it sounds in practice. La Vecchia
is very careful over phrasing and balance and in the early stages
there is the suspicion that he is living for the moment. The
argument sounds more symphonic under both Byrns and Francis.
In his anxiety not to let the textures become heavy, La Vecchia,
like Francis, fails to give the music the strength and power
it has under Byrns. I would place his performance slightly below
either of the others since it is really neither one thing nor
the other.
In the slow movement, however, the contest seems to be between
Byrns and La Vecchia. It is not really an issue of timing: Byrns
takes 12:09, Francis 12:28, La Vecchia 12:24. Though Byrns is
only minimally faster by the stopwatch he nevertheless propels
the music onwards purposefully, the piano-accompanied funeral
march climaxing powerfully and uncompromisingly.
Francis finds a lush lyricism in this movement, almost as if
he wishes to invest it with Baxian hedonism. It is an interesting
idea and might have been completely convincing if he had persuaded
the orchestra to drop below mezzo forte at least sometimes.
As things stand, his reading has a trace of monotony that I
don’t find in the others. Let me emphasize again that
I am talking about a live performance by Francis, not his CPO
recording which may be quite different for all I know.
Lack of pianos and pianissimos is certainly not a failing of
La Vecchia, who finds a sense of brooding unease. He opens up
a dimension not explored by Byrns, let alone Francis. I still
feel that the music sounds more “important” under
Byrns, but La Vecchia’s insights are not to be disregarded.
The scherzo has suggestions of Prokofief in demonic mood. All
three conductors recognize that it is not to be taken too fast:
Byrns 8:09, Francis 7:04, La Vecchia 7:45. Byrns gives greater
emphasis to the offbeat accents and evokes a blundering war-machine,
along the lines of Holst’s Mars. La Vecchia, more refined
in his colouring, finds an element of mystery. The important
thing is that both fully realize its menacing character. I am
afraid that Francis, though only marginally faster, just sounds
busy.
The finale is a rondo in C major, but with an epilogue recalling
the slow movement and a brilliant final pay-off. David Gallagher,
in his notes, likens it to the finale of Mahler’s 7th
symphony, a jubilant C major peroration, or maybe a parody of
one. Casella certainly had good reason to know Mahler 7, having
been commissioned by Mahler himself to make a piano duet version
of it. As with the Mahler, the problem is whether to take it
seriously or to romp through it. In addition, with the Casella
there is the problem of how to relate the epilogue and the coda
to the rest.
It will come as no surprise by now that Byrns has the longest
timing, 14:29, Francis the shortest, 12:25, with La Vecchia
somewhere in between, 13:56. Byrns takes the body of the music
at a brisk march tempo. There is a sense of striving which is
carried through the various contrasting episodes. Under Byrns
the slow epilogue has a hard-won inevitability while the coda
comes as a natural release. Neither of the other two conductors
achieve this.
Francis adopts a gallop-like tempo and avoids investing the
music with too much weight. La Vecchia characterizes the individual
moments at the expense of the whole, losing momentum in the
first lyrical episode. Neither of them convince me that the
epilogue has to be there, and at that particular moment, or
that the coda is not just stuck on for effect.
This, as I have said, is a “war symphony”. In 1954
the war was a recent memory and Byrns had lived through it,
albeit on the opposite side of the fence to Casella. Under his
direction the symphony is revealed as a powerful document of
its times. His performance has an ethos that is probably close
to Casella’s own vision. Francis seems to enjoy the symphony
above all for its technical and orchestral fluency. La Vecchia
explores moods and aspects that may not have been of primary
importance to Casella himself but, in the slow movement in particular,
uncovers beauties that might have surprised earlier listeners.
If this symphony is to speak to future audiences, it clearly
has need of conductors able to reinterpret it in the spirit
of their own times.
So what are the future prospects for Casella’s 3rd
Symphony? The Italians have a capacity for neglecting their
non-operatic composers that maybe exceeds even British underestimation
of its native products. I doubt if this piece has had many more
outings in Italy than the two I’ve discussed. It was commissioned
by the Chicago SO and premiered by them under Frederick Stock
in 1940. I wonder if it has ever been played again there? Or
ever in Great Britain? It reached Vienna in 1941, conducted
by Furtwängler, but have the VPO played it in more recent
years? At the time I taped the Byrns and Francis broadcasts
I was only moderately impressed. I must say that comparing these
three performances has increased my appreciation of what now
seems to me a very fine work. Nevertheless, its themes are not
sufficiently memorable to gain it a popularity to match the
best of Prokofief or Shostakovich. Nor does it have an instantly
recognizable individual atmosphere. Only with repeated hearings
do the themes begin to stick and a personal voice become apparent.
I shall continue to go back most often to Byrns, whose recording
sounds much better than most RAI survivals from the early 1950s.
This is obviously not an option for most listeners. Some may
question the utility of comparing a commercial recording with
two off-the-air tapings that are unlikely ever to reach CD.
I think it is important to show that the new Naxos disc, while
it offers a fine reading, does not offer the only or even necessarily
the best interpretative solution. There would be room for a
broader alternative in the Byrns mould. Some collectors will
remember that Harold Byrns (1903-1977) made several fine LPs
with the Los Angeles Chamber Symphony. If anyone feels like
reassessing his work, they might like to bear in mind this one.
I’m sorry I can’t tell those who have Francis’s
CPO disc whether the new Naxos version surpasses it, as
by and large it surpasses Francis’s live performance.
But I think they will find it worth paying the modest Naxos
price either way for the sake of the “Heroic Elegy - to
the memory of a soldier who died in the war”. This is
a product of the First World War. Casella was at that time a
more overtly modernist composer, much under the spell of Stravinsky’s
very recent “Rite of Spring”, which he comes close
to quoting once or twice. After a violent beginning he shows
that he has learnt from Stravinsky’s moments of ominous
quiet no less than from his frenzied noisiness. The first performance
in 1917 drew protests from the Roman audience. Nearly a century
later we might find this fairly early Casella more immediately
communicative than his later self.
Where Stravinsky sought primeval forces buried in man’s
collective memory, Casella applied the new techniques to a more
traditional programme. The violent, protesting opening gives
way to elegiac lamentation and finally to a berceuse “evoking
an image of our country as a mother cradling her dead son”,
capped by a few phrases from the Italian national anthem. So
good old Italian “mammismo” gets the last word.
One might draw a parallel with the paintings of Gaetano Previati
- you will find his “Maternità” easily enough
on the internet if you want to follow this up. He, too, used
then-modern techniques - in his case “divisionismo”,
an Italian cousin of pointillism - combined with symbolism,
but channelled them into sentimental messages closer to Victorian
genre painting. Ultimately, then, we have here modernized Respighi,
but as long as we don’t mistake it for Stravinsky himself
the piece can still cast a haunting spell. I had no performance
comparisons, nor a score, but I was totally convinced by La
Vecchia’s reading.
Curiously, the booklet has notes in English and Italian that
are not translations of one another but separate articles. Marta
Marullo’s Italian essay is shorter but concentrates on
the music heard on the disc. David Gallagher spends more than
half his space on an examination of Casella’s relations
with Fascism. The usual arguments are paraded - he was old,
he was politically naive, he didn’t understand what was
happening, he was basically a kindly man, he even married a
Jewess, etc., etc. In a full-scale biography all this would
have to be tackled. Marullo ignores the issue and I tend to
agree with her implied verdict that nowadays what matters is
the music itself. In other words, when one is writing not a
biography of Casella but liner notes for a CD of his Third Symphony,
the Fascism issue is only worth bringing in if it bears directly
on the music.
Neither she nor Gallagher actually proclaim the symphony to
be a product of Fascism. And yet there is a way in which it
could be considered Fascist art. Here we might seek another
pictorial comparison. We might look at the Novecento movement
with its lauding of ancient Roman architecture combined - once
again - with a sentimental outlook reminiscent of the Pre-Raphaelites.
Often this glorification of Latin monumentality was expressed
in vast frescoes, of which Casella’s 45-minute symphony
is an obvious parallel. We might also consider how the development
of many fine artists was deviated as a result of their getting
caught up in the Fascist ideals. The painter Carlo Carrà
began and ended his career as an exponent of essentially intimate
atmospheres. In between, during the two Fascist decades, he
went in for monumental frescoes like all the rest. Carrà
lived long enough into the post-war era to rediscover his former
self, albeit stylistically transformed. Since Casella died in
1947 he did not have this opportunity. If we look back to his
beginnings, to his charming Fauré-like barcarolle for
flute and piano from early in the century, for example, we may
wonder if he was not led astray from the path nature had set
out for him. But then, the two world wars had a disruptive influence
on all artists, no matter what side they were on. Casella’s
talents in any case enabled him to write what is probably the
strongest and most symphonic symphony written by an Italian.
A trick may have been lost by placing the Elegy last on the
disc. Listening to the pastoral opening of the Symphony immediately
after the concluding berceuse of the Elegy, one can only recognize
the essential continuity of Casella’s art, in spite of
the stylistic shifts.
Christopher Howell
see also review by Nick
Barnard
Reviews of other Casella recordings
on Naxos
8.572413
- Symphony 1
8.572414
- Symphony 2
8.572416
- Cello concerto
Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma/Francesco La Vecchia 
