Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936): Sinfonia Drammatica

Ottorino Respighi was born in Bologna in 1879 and studied the violin and viola at the Liceo Musicale from 1891 with Federico Sarti. At the same time he took lessons in composition, at first from the musicologist Luigi Torchi, who had returned to Bologna from the Liceo Rossiui in Pesaro in the same year, and later from the composer Giuseppe Martucci, who was director of the Liceo until 1902. In 1899 he completed his studies and the following year went to St Petersburg as principal viola-player at the Imperial Opera. In Russia, where he spent the seasons of 1901-02 and 1902-03, he took lessons from Rimsky- Korsakov in composition and orchestration.

During the first decade of the present century Respighi won a reputation as a performer, while pursuing his growing interest in earlier music and in composition. In Berlin during 1908 and 1909 he attended lectures by Max Bruch, to relatively little effect. The influence of Rimsky-Korsakov, however, was to remain with him and to guide his bold use of orchestral colour. These years brought a series of compositions. In 1902 his Piano Concerto in A minor was performed in Bologna and his Notturno of 1905 was played in New York under Rodolfo Ferrari. The latter year saw the first production of his opera Rè Enzo in Bologna, a work followed five years later by Semirama, these operas winning him a reputation that led, in 1913, to his appointment as teacher of composition at the Liceo di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

In 1919 Respighi married a singer, Elsa Olivieri-Sangiacomo, and in 1924 became director of Santa Cecilia, resigning two years later to devote himself to composition, although he continued to teach and to perform in concerts as a conductor and as an accompanist to his wife. He died in 1936 at the house he had named after one of his most famous works, Pini di Roma.

Respighi's international reputation, which still exceeds that of any other Italian composer of his generation, depends very largely on the symphonic poems that offer evocative and pictorial representations of Rome. Fontane di Roma, four vivid pictures of the fountains of the city, was completed in 1916. Pini di Roma, an evocation of Roman scenes associated with the pines of the city, followed in 1924, and this was to be succeeded by the Feste romane in 1929, a work coloured by a certain contemporary political optimism. In 1918 he provided the Russian ballet impresario Dyagilev with a score derived from Rossini, La boutique fantasque, a work that has continued in popular ballet repertoire since its first performance in London in 1919. A later ballet, Belkis, Regina di Saba, was written in 1931, and performed at La Scala, Milan, in the following year. There were, too, other operas which have largely failed 10 capture the public imagination, although offering music of considerable interest.

Another aspect of Respighi's work was his enthusiasm for earlier music. Gregorian chant was to suggest a melodic source for compositions such as the Concerto gregoriano, for violin, and the Concerto in modo misolidio, for piano, as well as the orchestral Vetrate di chiesa of 1927, symphonic impressions of the windows of four churches. He arranged various sets of lute dances for orchestra, and assembled a collection of orchestral birds for the sequence Gli uccelli, based on bird-pieces by keyboard composers of the eighteenth century. A more thorough example of this tendency to look to the past was seen in his last opera, Lucrezia, performed at La Scala the year after his death.

Respighi's Sinfonia Drammatica was completed in 1914. It is a substantial work that has been regarded by some as a further example of Respighi's early eclecticism. The dramatic mood is established at once as the orchestra launches into music that may at times remind us of Mahler, particularly in elements of orchestration and lyrical melancholy. Richard Strauss was, of course, a strong influence in this earlier period of the composer's life, if not the most immediately apparent here, except, perhaps, in the scale of the symphony and its occasional extravagance of orchestral effect. The second movement might suggest the influence of Debussy, in mood and idiom, with an interlude of solemn medieva1ism, leading to dramatic intensity, which is then replaced by are turn to the initia1 tranquillity, disturbed briefly once again before fina1 serenity is restored. The fina1 Allegro impetuoso unleashes powerful forces that offer a bewildering variety of mood and incident, making full use of orchestra1 colour that does everything to justify the title of the work.

Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra
The Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra was founded in 1949 as the first state symphony orchestra in Slovakia. The orchestra's style was developed by such major conductors as Vaclav Talich, Ludovit Rajter, Ladislav Slovak, Libor Pesek, Vladimir Verbitsky, Bystrik Relucha and Aldo Ceccato who served as principal conductors, and many other guest conductors, including Zdenek Kosler, Janos Ferencsik, Carlo Zecchi, Dmitri Kitayenko, Claudio Abbado, James Conlon, Maris Jansons, Kurt Masur, Sergiu Celibidache, Vladimir Fedoseyev, Leonard Slatkin, James Judd and Jean-Claude Casadesus. Since 1991 its principal conductor has been Ondrej Lenard, who in 1995 was appointed musical director of the orchestra. The orchestra has toured Europe, USA and Japan several times, participating in major international festivals, and has made a great number of recordings for a variety of labels.

Daniel Nazareth
Daniel Nazareth was born in Bombay and took a degree in Commerce and Economics at Bombay University in 1968. He later studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, where he was awarded the Sir Adrian Boult Cup, following this with a period of study at the Vienna Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst, from which he graduated with distinction in 1975. He served as Conducting Assistant to the Vienna Musikverein in the 1975-76 season.

In 1977 Daniel Nazareth made his debut as a conductor of opera with Mozart's Cosi fan tutte at the Spoleto Festival, and in 1978 he conducted Le nozze di Figaro, Il barbiere di Siviglia and La traviara for the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto. In March 1982 he conducted a new production of Britten's The Rape of Lucretia for the Arena Theatre in Verona. In 1976 Daniel Nazareth was awarded the Leonard Bernstein Conducting Fellowship and the Koussevitsky Music Foundation Conductor's Award at Tanglewood, and in 1978 he won the first International Ernest Ansermet Conducting Competition in Geneva.