Almost exclusively remembered nowadays for his 1892 opera
La
Wally,
Catalani was a precocious composer of orchestral scores. He
completed his
Symphony for full orchestra at the age of just 18 and
the
Morning, romantic symphony just two years later.
With their proven commercial acumen, Naxos have, I imagine, selected works
that they hope will make the best case for the composer on this new
release. It would be fair to say, nevertheless, that my colleague
Brian Reinhart didn't much care for it (
see here). True enough, he credited the
artists and the producers for their enterprise in mining some of the more
obscure byways of Italian musical history, but he was singularly unimpressed
with Catalani's scores and considered them distinctly
formulaic. Indeed, Brian's tongue-in-cheek suggestion that his
teenage self could have come up with something just as good subsequently
sparked a brief, well-tempered exchange of opinion on our website's
message board (
see
here).
It is true that there are more than a few points where Catalani seems less
than confident of his skills and is essentially composing by numbers - the
"storm" episode of
Ero e Leandro, for instance, or the
early morning hubbub depicted in
Il Mattino - but I will nail my
colours to the mast right away and admit that I rather enjoyed this
disc. While I doubt that anyone will claim these scores as
masterpieces, they nonetheless provided me with almost an hour of innocent
but quite considerable pleasure.
It is not, I think, necessary to subject the music to detailed
analysis.
Ero e Leandro is certainly episodic, but arguably
no more so than - by the very nature of the beast - many other symphonic
poems of the time. Catalani handles the links between the
comparatively straightforward story's various sections skilfully and
effectively. His score does, moreover, contain some rather beautiful
melodies, notably those depicting both the surging sea and the
lovers' "ecstasy", as the composer coyly terms it.
The brief
Scherzo of 1878 and the earlier and even more succinct
- yet more thematically varied -
Andantino are both less ambitious
and give the impression of a young composer finding his way with the
resources of an orchestra. It is not without significance that both
pieces have also survived, as we learn from Marta Marullo's usefully
informative booklet notes, in alternative versions for solo piano.
The more substantial
Contemplazione was a particular target of
Brian's scorn, dismissed as "Catalani's big dud" and
also prompting him to ask "how many 'contemplative'
pieces do you know that involve a climactic tam-tam thwack?" It
is perhaps worth observing in response that there are, after all, several
different varieties of "contemplation" and that not all of them
are indicative of insipid navel-gazing. In its specifically spiritual
sense, for example, where a meditative process aims to achieve nothing less
than one-to-one experience of God, I'd have thought that a climactic
stroke on a tam-tam might well be the musically appropriate response to an
awe-inspiring revelation of the deity himself. In any case, I have to
admit that, maybe as a consequence of the ageing process, my own ears
didn't actually detect that "thwack" at all.
Meanwhile,
Contemplazione's many attractive
cantabile
elements certainly play to Catalani's undoubted strengths as a
composer and I enjoyed the piece a great deal.
I had imagined, in advance of actually hearing it, that the "romantic
symphony"
Morning would provide some sort of final, conclusive
advocacy for Catalani's orchestral scores, but it proves, in fact,
oddly anti-climactic. This is self-evidently a depiction of a
rustic morning, full of chirruping birdsong and general bustling
about as a new day of country life gets under way. Nevertheless, the
most effective and memorable moments occur - as in
Ero e Leandro -
when the composer eases the pace slightly so as to introduce more lyrical
elements - 7:04-7:46, for instance, though that brief passage is all too
soon superseded by a return to yet more bustling - leaving me to wonder
whether Catalani's talents might not have been better employed in
composing an appropriately atmospheric
Evening symphony instead of
this one.
With expert and idiomatic performances from the Rome orchestra and
conductor Francesco La Vecchia, fine work by the recording engineers and the
attractive Naxos price point, anyone who enjoys late 19th century orchestral
music will not, I think, be disappointed in taking a gamble with this new
release. These unfamiliar scores may not be masterpieces but they
certainly do not deserve the obscurity in which they have languished for
more than a century.
Rob Maynard
Previous review:
Brian Reinhart
