MusicWeb International One of the most grown-up review sites around 2024
60,000 reviews
... and still writing ...

Search MusicWeb Here Acte Prealable Polish CDs
 

Presto Music CD retailer
 
Founder: Len Mullenger                                    Editor in Chief:John Quinn             


Some items
to consider

new MWI
Current reviews

old MWI
pre-2023 reviews

paid for
advertisements

Acte Prealable Polish recordings

Forgotten Recordings
Forgotten Recordings
All Forgotten Records Reviews

TROUBADISC
Troubadisc Weinberg- TROCD01450

All Troubadisc reviews


FOGHORN Classics

Alexandra-Quartet
Brahms String Quartets

All Foghorn Reviews


All HDTT reviews


Songs to Harp from
the Old and New World


all Nimbus reviews



all tudor reviews


Follow us on Twitter


Editorial Board
MusicWeb International
Founding Editor
   
Rob Barnett
Editor in Chief
John Quinn
Contributing Editor
Ralph Moore
Webmaster
   David Barker
Postmaster
Jonathan Woolf
MusicWeb Founder
   Len Mullenger


 
REVIEW


Advertising on
Musicweb


Donate and keep us afloat

 

New Releases

Naxos Classical
All Naxos reviews

Chandos recordings
All Chandos reviews

Hyperion recordings
All Hyperion reviews

Foghorn recordings
All Foghorn reviews

Troubadisc recordings
All Troubadisc reviews



all Bridge reviews


all cpo reviews

Divine Art recordings
Click to see New Releases
Get 10% off using code musicweb10
All Divine Art reviews


All Eloquence reviews

Lyrita recordings
All Lyrita Reviews

 

Wyastone New Releases
Obtain 10% discount

Subscribe to our free weekly review listing

 

 

alternatively
CD: AmazonUK AmazonUS
Download: Classicsonline


Franco ALFANO (1875-1954)
Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano (1932) [28:24]
Sonata for Cello and Piano (1925) [31:42]
Elmira Darvarova (violin), Scott Dunn (piano), Samuel Magill (cello)
rec. 9-10 June 2008, M&I Studios, New York
NAXOS 8.570928 [60:06]

Experience Classicsonline
Both these works were new to me and both have given me a good deal of pleasure since I made their acquaintance. Alfano’s fame has always been chiefly bound up with his completion of Turandot, a completion with which Toscanini famously and crudely expressed his dissatisfaction - to put it mildly - by walking out on the opening night at La Scala in 1926 at the very point where Puccini’s music ended and Alfano’s began. Alfano’s own work as an opera composer – notably in Risurezzione (1904), La leggenda di Sakłntala 1921 and Cyrano de Bergerac (1936) – has done rather more for his reputation. Perhaps it is not surprising that Konrad Dryden’s 2010 study of the composer should be entitled Franco Alfano: Transcending Turandot. Franco’s instrumental music largely awaits reassessment – a process to which this Naxos CD will surely make an important contribution. Further revelations will be delivered by the CPO disc of his first and second symphonies (CPO 777 080) played by the Brandenburg State Orchestra of Frankfurt, conducted by Israel Yinon.

The earlier of the two works on the present disc, the Sonata for Cello and Piano, is an impressive piece, particularly in the way it exploits something like the full range of the cello’s tonal colours. Running over half an hour in performance, it is a work of some substance. Alfano’s intriguing writing and strong sense of design, along with the fine performance it gets from Samuel Magill and Scott Dunn, mean that it is never in danger of outstaying its welcome. The first movement of the work - one of the many written to a commission from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge - has a predominantly pensive quality, steeped in a kind of calm nostalgia, but not without spiritual overtones. The central allegretto con grazia makes one think of Ravel at times; it is a movement that has many not-always-easy-to-anticipate twists and turns and some strikingly exotic phrases at times. The closing movement is passionate and full of dark colours on the cello, angry at one moment, more optimistic at another, and finally falling away as if all passion has been spent. The sonata as a whole is a fine work which deserves to be better known. It here gets a performance of sufficient quality to make one hope that it might become so.

I didn’t find the ‘Concerto’, written seven years later, as exciting on a first hearing as the Cello Sonata had proved. But further listenings have revealed a work of considerable subtlety and range, a work which – in its grounding in the reclamation of the Italian past, musical and otherwise – has things in common with Respighi, though the music of the two composers wouldn’t, I think, be easily confused. The long first movement (‘con dolce malinconia’) echoes the modes of the Renaissance church at its opening, but such reminiscences give way to more turbulent music which one might readily imagine to be the musical translation of a Renaissance tragedy. In the second movement (‘allegretto fantastico’) there are splendid instrumental dialogues, conversations conducted across and around rhythms which appear to owe much to basque and gipsy traditions. The final presto has more than a little of the ceremonial about it; indeed in his very helpful booklet note cellist Samuel Magill declares that it “is clearly a celebration of ancient Rome”. Certainly such an interpretation - though it needn’t limit modern responses to the music - would fit in with the politico-cultural climate in Italy at the time of composition. It was premiered at the Accademia Santa Cecilia in Rome in 1933, with the composer at the piano. This ‘Concerto’ makes considerable technical demands on all three instrumentalists and all those demands are met, and turned to thoroughly musical effect in this fine performance. If you are interested in Italian instrumental music or in the music of late-Romanticism, please don’t fail to hear this impressive disc.

Glyn Pursglove

see also review by Jonathan Woolf

 
Error processing SSI file



Untitled Document


Reviews from previous months
Join the mailing list and receive a hyperlinked weekly update on the discs reviewed. details
We welcome feedback on our reviews. Please use the Bulletin Board
Please paste in the first line of your comments the URL of the review to which you refer.