the concerto is an invigorating blend of splashiness and substance. Algae, The Little Mermaid, and Clematis are elegant tone-pictures. The Five Little Waltzes are charmers—literally minute waltzes, spiced up with clever cross-rhythms. Waves, a thank-you piece to his doctor, depicts short and long musical waves with ingenious figurations. The interpretation of the concerto sounds fine, the orchestra swaggering or reticent as needed. Pietro Massa merges the best of classical technique…

To read the complete review, please visit American Record Guide online.

Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco was a prolific and eclectic composer, but he is best known for his music for guitar, beginning with works written for Andrés Segovia. After emigrating to America in 1939, he joined the group of European Jewish composers, escapees from the Nazis, who had settled in Hollywood to make music for the movies. He lived out a quiet and successful career there, also teaching at the Los Angeles Conservatory of Music, where his star pupils included Henry Mancini, Jerry Goldsmith, and John Williams. He died in 1968.

This delightful new release showcases a side of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s output that is less well known. In fact, there are three world premieres here, including, amazingly, this lovely piano concerto. All of this music is from the prewar period, when Castelnuovo-Tedesco was living and working in his home town of Florence. The Piano Concerto No. 2 was written latest, completed in 1937 shortly before the composer was forced to leave Italy with his family. Perhaps as an antidote to the deeply disturbing circumstances of his life at the time, this is an extraordinarily sunny work, bursting with bright color and energy. It has the structure and scale of a Mozart concerto, and seems inspired by the master’s supreme lucidity of texture. The music is not without repose or even hints of sadness, but is devoid of angst. It is a sweet, perhaps old-fashioned concoction, but beautifully put together, and well deserving of a wider audience.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s solo piano music shares the elegance and clarity of the concerto, as well as a completely unpretentious manner of expression. The music ranges from the 1919 Alghe, a work inspired by the composer’s impressions of a number of sensual encounters, including the scent of drying algae (alghe, in Italian). It marks a basically impressionistic style that is echoed in the balance of the program, as well as a Chopin-like neoclassicism in the waltzes and studies.

The performances here are spirited and affectionate, if a bit rough around the edges, as evidenced by a smudged run here and there in what sounds like rather challenging piano writing, and an occasionally wooly ensemble by Berlin’s other orchestra. But this release is highly welcomed as a revelation, really, that Castelnuovo-Tedesco was not merely a composer of guitar recital staples.

CASTELNUOVO-TEDESCO, M.: Piano Concerto No. 2 / Passatempi / Onde / La sirenetta e il pesce turchino / Alghe / Vitalba e Biancospina (Massa) C5046
DALLAPICCOLA, L.: Piano Music (Piano Rarities) (Massa) C5045

The Florence Conservatory figured heavily in the lives of these two Italian composers. It was there that Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) received his musical training between 1912 and 1918 from Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880–1968, see the newsletter of 10 September 2010), and where Luigi Dallapiccola (1904–1975) got a degree, becoming a professor of piano in 1931. But the rise of the Nazis (1933–45) with their anti-Semitic policies soon created hardships for both men.

Being Jewish, Mario fled to the United States in 1939, where he’d spend the rest of his life, supplementing his income by writing Hollywood film scores like his fellow expatriates Schoenberg (1874–1951), Korngold (1897–1957, see the newsletter of 9 August 2007) and Tansman (1897–1986, see the newsletter of 11 May 2009). As for Luigi, who was Aryan, his having a Jewish wife made their life in Italy increasingly difficult, to the point where they were forced into hiding on a couple of occasions during World War II (1939–45).

Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote tonally based music of late romantic persuasion throughout his career, while Dallapiccola adopted the serialist principles of the Second Viennese School in his later works. All of the selections on the two CDs featured here are either tonal or soft-core dodecaphonic.

The first one is devoted to piano music by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and begins with the world première recording of his second piano concerto. Written between 1936 and 1937, which were some of the worst years in fascist Italy for the composer, it had to wait until he escaped to America for its first performance at Carnegie Hall in New York City (1939). In the standard three movements, the piano is set off against a medium-sized orchestra made all the more colorful with the inclusion of a variety of winds and even a bell. The animated opening movement has a couple of attractive thematic ideas the composer develops with some attendant keyboard pyrotechnics reminiscent of Rachmaninov (1873–1943).

The following romanza… is the concerto’s emotional core with two alternating spun-out melodies that are sequentially graceful and introspective. It segues directly into the restless angular finale that may remind you of Paganini’s (1762–1840) more showy moments. The closing measures contain impressive bravura piano passages, and a fiery finish for full orchestra.

Five works for solo piano fill out the disc, beginning with two related to the sea. They are La sirenetta e il pesce turchino – Flaba marina (The Little Mermaid and the Turquoise Fish &ndas
more....