A cursory glance through Nino Rota’s credits as a composer of
great film music scores reveals him to be the very centre of the
European film-making tradition: The Glass Mountain (1949),
La dolce vita (1960), Il Gattopardo (1963), 8½
(1963), Romeo and Juliet (1968), The Godfather, Parts
I & II (1972 and 1974), Amarcord (1973) and Death
on the Nile (1978), to name just a few of more than 150. This
is even more remarkable when one learns that the great Italian
film-maker Federico Fellini employed Rota to write the score to every film he made from the time
of their first collaboration on Lo sceicco blanco (The
White Sheik) in 1952 until Rota’s death in April 1979 caused The Orchestra Rehearsal
to be his last film score. Rota also wrote notable music for directors such as Zeffirelli,
Visconti and Coppola, for whose film The Godfather, Part II
Rota’s score won an Oscar.
Rota had studied
at the Malan Conservatorio with Ildebrando Pizzetti, with
whose music Rota’s works share
a wonderful post-Romantic sweep and richness. Rota made no distinctions
between his music for film and that for the concert hall or
theatre. There is a fair amount of cross-fertilisation between
Rota’s symphonic
works and those for film. The Sinfonia sopra una canzone
d’amore which opens this attractive CD was written in
1947, although only orchestrated and performed as late as
1972. Rota ‘borrowed’ three of the Sinfonia’s four movements
in film scores for The Glass Mountain and Il Gattopardo.
The Sinfonia sopra una Canzone d’Amore could be
described as a neo-classical symphony. It is certainly cast
in a very traditional mould. There’s a relaxed sonata-form
movement whose main theme curiously reminded me of Smetana’s
Vltava. This is followed by a rustic scherzo-like movement.
A beautiful Andante sostenuto forms the heart of the
symphony and is a testament to Rota’s remarkable melodic and harmonic gifts. After this
comes a slightly uneasy finale.
Rather lighter in character and perhaps more recognisable
to those familiar with Rota’s film music is the Concerto-Soirée for Piano
and Orchestra. The CD booklet gives the date of composition
as 1958 but other sources – including the official Nino Rota
website – give it as 1961-62. The booklet also claims the
piece to be “one of the most demanding pieces of piano literature
of our century”. Surely not the piece I was listening to!
I checked the original Italian text by Albert Erlöser and
found a mistranslation of the Italian word impegnativi,
which means ‘demanding of attention’ or, simply, ‘important’
perhaps, although I’m not sure that claim is valid
either. What we have in essence is a 20-minute, five-movement
divertimento for piano and orchestra full of attractive and
idiomatic writing. The beautiful Romanza third movement
later found its way into the score for the 1966 ballet La
Strada, itself based largely on music from the 1954 Fellini
film. Music from the final Can-can – a rather darker
movement than one might expect from such a title – is to be
found in the score to the film 8½.
The pianist Benedetto Lupo, winner of the bronze medal
in the 1988 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, was
mentored by Rota as a young
student and so one would expect him to offer a unique insight
into this music. He certainly plays with great fluidity and
panache and is perfectly accompanied by the Sicilian Orchestra
under a rather noisy conductor
Massimo de Bernart who seems prone to grunting in a way I
found annoying on repeated listenings. The 1991 recording
sounds slightly studio-bound to my ears but is fine enough.
A shame that Arts decided not to fill the CD further; 49 minutes
is rather short measure and there are plenty of other works
that could have been added to further the cause of Rota’s concert music.
Derek Warby
see also Review
by Bob Briggs
Benedetto Lupo (piano) 
