Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965)
Musica da Concerto for Viola, Viola d’amore and String Orchestra
Musica Concertante for Cello and String Orchestra
Paul Hindemith (1895-1963)
Fünf Stücke Op 44 No 4 for String Orchestra (1927)
Simonide Braconi (viola & viola d’amore)
Enrico Bronzi (cello)
Nuova Orchestra da Camera “Ferrucio Busoni”/Massimo Belli
rec. Hydrodynamic Power Station, Porto Vecchio of Trieste, Italy
BRILLIANT CLASSICS 96117 [52]
A quiet man of Italian 20th century music, Ghedini was a distinguished teacher in Turin, among whose alumni were Claudio Abbado, Berio and Castiglioni. He always felt that composition should be kept sacred from the need to earn a living: “Never turn art into a comfortable career. Music is invention, always; it is separate from everyday reality, a dream, a poetic vision.”
His music seems to occupy rarefied realms, often intensely meditative, emotionally searching, but also playful and fantastical. String orchestras and soloists (especially the cello) are at the heart of his achievement; those few works for full orchestra such as Architetture - Concerto for Orchestra never seem quite so distinctive, despite the impact they had at the time of their premiere.
Never easy to pin down to a given style or derivation, his music is probably more neo-baroque than neo-classical, but by the mid-1940s he had developed a supple and wide-ranging style, going back further still to the age of Monteverdi and Gabrieli, beautifully-blended sources he fashions into works of high originality and intensity - yet also of a recurring and characteristic gentleness, sensitive to each whisper of mood and sound, listening to, and in, each moment.
Quintessentially a Concertante composer, his finest and most mature work is often in an expansive single-movement span of several contrasting sections closer to the Corellian Concerto Grosso but with a much wider emotional and colouristic range. The fast-slow-fast Classical pattern is often discernible in the formal layering, and all the more fascinating for it, but the cool and elegant formalities of the Concerto Grosso are a mere background to an often intensely expressive, very flexible, 20th Century idiom.
Two of the finest examples of the String Concertos feature on this album.
The Musical da Concerto, for Viola and Strings, dates from 1953, and was soon taken up by conductors such as Karajan (with Giuranna) and Beecham (with Riddle). I find the Beecham recording too Romantic, missing the work’s asceticism and purer neo-Baroque passions; the Karajan-led one has more to offer, if in restricted 1953 sound and less than perfect RAI ensemble - well worth hearing, though. Neither was the most enthusiastic champion of contemporary music. No wonder they were taken with Ghedini, the neo-Baroque-neo-Romantic tonal composer who subscribed to no obvious modernising movement or language. (In fact, Karajan recorded the Walton 1st with the RAI on the same day as the Ghedini - 5/12/53. Was the Ghedini a premiere in the year of its composition? I couldn't find out despite searching. It’s a shame that this more exploratory attitude became so rare later, in London, Vienna and Berlin.)
After an extended slow introduction, a restless urgency develops, but the pulse and dynamics are volatile, darkly impassioned, the viola in recitative-like bursts and hesitations playing almost continuously, without obvious clear themes or statements - more melismatic, going its own way, singing across any perceivable fast-slow-fast neo-classical background (it is striking how very persistent this formal model remained throughout the 20th Century!).
There is some marvellously imaginative solo writing here against fluttering ensemble strings, which Braconi assimilates brilliantly with shifts of colour and mood, and very responsively too; Massimo Belli is a compellingly attentive accompanist.
Around 11’, in the slow movement begins with a wonderfully husky viola part; one’s ears feast upon the throatiness, the textured weave of upper-bass harmonics. It has an improvisatory feel, the fluid continuous line drawing you in deep.
At this point I have to mention the album credits, where the work is listed for “Viola and Viola d’amore”. However, the notes tell us no more, and I could not find any other reference to this instrumentation in online articles about the composer. My ears tell me that Ghedini wrote the later part of the concerto for the more sonorous instrument, which comes in for the slow movement and finale further deepening the music’s poetic and textural complexity with those “sympathetic strings” (unplayed but resonating against the body of the Viola of Love.). I could not detect its distinctive timbre in any other recording I had access to, but on researching a little more I found that it does seem to feature on an Essay CD with Mela Tenenbaum as soloist, and the Czech Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra directed by Richard Kapp.
The lower strings growl a drum-roll and the finale rushes in, but the soloist soon takes us into a high rhapsodic song, descending into a final quietude. This is still troubled, however, becalmed rather than serene, the otherworldly, unresolved last chord fades slowly into silence, leaving us with a sense of emotional work left unfinished…
With this, and works like the hauntingly beautiful L’Olmeneta 2-cello concerto just before it, Ghedini really found his true genre. Several other such works were to follow, including the cello concerto on this album.
There are so few Viola Concertos in the 20th or 21st Century worlds (Telemann, of course wrote quite a few and Schnittke seemed fond of the genre, writing three of them), let alone many as fine as this. Fantastic and intensely fantastical, profoundly mysterious, it should be far better known. Sampling the few other recordings I could find (there are never many Ghedini alternatives!) this seems outstandingly the best, if with a slight caveat about the sonic balance - more on this later.
On to the 1962 Musica Concertante, for Cello and Strings, and at this point the sonic problem is more evident: the cello is just too close, looms too large in the soundstage, yet it can be much quieter later on and better balanced with the strings at lower levels, suggesting a degree of manipulative engineering. Sure, the ensemble is quite close and immediate too, but their detail isn’t always ideally clear behind the soloist. This is a pity, given the intensity and beauty of the performance; and a change of DAC filter settings for a more recessed soundstage helped a little. It is an unavoidable caveat, although the Viola Concerto is less affected.
This recording has a relentless intensity about it, close-up and full-on; its only serious comparator, Werner Thomas-Mifune with the Munich Chamber Orchestra and Hans Stadlmair, is more naturally spacious, texturally refined, and dynamically contrasted; beautifully done, and with the gorgeous L’Olmeneta on the same Koch Schwann album to offer even sweeter seductions - so if I had to choose just one…
The Musica Concertante is in several continuous sections, virtually monothematic on the opening cello solo, with constant melodic and rhythmic transformations and derivations from the initial idea. But the pace and dynamics vary widely, with surprising mood-swings along the sustained intensity of the winding melodic road.
Around two-thirds in, the basses inject pace and urgency and a finale seems to develop. But as in the Viola Concerto this dissipates into a reflective coda, with a remarkable ending where the ensemble stabs repeatedly at the cello’s sustained final notes. As ever, Ghedini prefers to avoid easy conclusions. “I will know my shadow and my light, so may I at last be one”, as Tippett put it.
This is an extraordinary work, with its baroque and pre-baroque harmonies and almost expressionistic intensity. Even in such a classic concerto century as the 20th, I can’t think of another piece quite like it (except elsewhere in Ghedini, of course).
Serious and severe, the Hindemith Five Pieces offer a brief contrast to the preceding and succeeding streams of lyricism. Composed in 1927 for a school orchestra, you feel those youngsters would have had to raise their game to deliver the Gebrauchsmusik rhythms and textures cleanly. Rather like a mini-suite of neo-Bach (with a few pre-echoes of the Mathis der Maler melodic profiles), and delivered with precision and panache by this superb band, they were a fascinating discovery for this lifelong Hindemithian obsessive.
Should you catch the Ghedinian bug (and really, why wouldn’t you?), I would recommend the Koch Schwann album (3-1782-2, conductors Stadlmair and Schmöhe) of Concertos mentioned above including L’Olmeneta and the Invenzione; and the Stradivarius issue (STR 33840) of three playfully unpredictable concerti for violin and flute, led by Francesco di Mauro. There is also an excellent Naxos set of the earlier Violin Sonatas, part of the Naxos Ghedini series, with more than hint of the sublimities to come.
Jayne Lee Wilson
