Len Mullenger's MusicWeb International
has been around since the 1990s. The classical CD review
pages became fully active in 1998. Discs predating that launch
have passed us by so it is good to catch up with them through
an increasingly active reissue market. This is one such.
I knew of Pizzetti because
of his operatic setting of Eliot's play
Murder
in the Cathedral - not that I have heard a note of
it. Hyperion have opened a window onto his neglected orchestral
music. It's lush and grand late-romantic stuff.
The
Rondo Veneziano is
a bold and fantastic symphonic poem with rapturous orchestral
writing contrasted with the surreal tinkling harpsichord
and the solo violin. The brass writing is imperious - striking
a convincing yet hybrid accommodation between Bax and Respighi.
At the close this Venetian impression sinks into the warm
silence of the Mediterranean night.
Preludio a un altro
giorno is
the latest work here. It dates from 22 years after the
Rondo.
A stern work, it is in a fully resolved romantic style
with some determinedly recurrent hammering brass climaxes.
This is the sort of plenteously stocked orchestral writing
that we know from Respighi's
Vetrate di Chiesa.
The piece ends in gaunt tragedy of the sort felt in the
gruff pages of
Finlandia.
The three symphonic preludes
from
L'Edipo Re di Sofocle range from sombre
brooding atmospheric to tragedy marbled with melancholy and
reflective-epic. You might perhaps see these as akin to the
Music
for a Scene from Shelley or the
Essays by
Samuel Barber.
The concert suite
Pisanella is
in five movements drawn from the incidental music Pizzetti
wrote in 1913 for a production of Gabriele d'Annunzio's
La
Pisanella. The suite was premiered at the Augusteo in
Rome in 1917. The whole thing plays for just short of 23
minutes. After a delicate Ravelian
Sire Huguet which
nonetheless rises to a dazzling Daphnis-style ripely fanfared
climax we get a
Le quai movement that has a Rimskian
brightness with more fruitily blurted exuberance.
Au chateau
de la reine sans merci falls into two sections - one
darker and murmuring to reflect the merciless queen. The
second catches the glow of the play's rose garden. It's quite
Baxian in that composer’s early and densely verdant style
familiar from
Nympholept and
Spring Fire.
La
danse de pauvreté et de parfait amour moves from a dewy
melancholy touched in by solo string instruments and gradually
transforms into something grandly affirmative. There’s tons
of weight behind the great leaping string writing.
La
danse de l'amour et de la mort parfumée includes a half
glum and half carefree series of solos. These are at first
by clarinet and finally other parts of the orchestra are
swept up into the excitement.
The more I listen to this
music the more I hear it as an extension of works such as
Rimsky's
Antar, Biarent’s
Chants de l’Orient and
Schmitt's
Antoine et Cléopatre. It has a certain lush
Hollywood feel to it and is not for ascetic souls.
You can hear an alternative
version of
La Pisanella and also the
Concerto del
Estate on
Decca
Eloquence.
This music could hardly have
more committed and adept advocacy than it receives from Vänskä and
the BBC Scottish. Wonderful to have this now at Helios
price. The disc could hardly have been packed out more generously.
Rob Barnett
BBC Scottish
Symphony Orchestra/Osmo Vänskä 
