Search - Nino Rota, Daniel Boico, I Virtuosi Italiani :: Nino Rota: Cello Concertos Nos. 1 & 2

Two Marvelous Concertos by Rota

Thomas F. Bertonneau | Oswego, NY United States | 12/27/2001

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Nino Rota (1911-1979) belonged to the same generation, chronologically speaking, as Goffredo Petrassi and Bruno Maderna, the one slightly older and the other slightly younger. Yet Rota remained worlds apart from his countrymen-pioneers into the Schoenbergian postwar avant-garde; his music reflected that of older men such as Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Ottorino Respighi. Rota's concert scores were invariably tuneful and clearly orchestrated - and remarkably friendly to audiences. His sense of form (very eighteenth century) makes him a neoclassicist, but his musical language - his idiom so to speak - is neo-Romantic. The trendsetters naturally ignored his works. Never mind: Rota made his living writing for the films, notably at the repeated behest of Federico Fellini; he also headed the conservatory at Bari. The concert works represent pure devotion, or maybe the pure spontaneity of a perpetually inspired music maker. Like Miklos Rozsa in Hollywood, Rota traded roles with ease and sometimes used music from his cinema accompaniments in his concert pieces. Because he approached film music so seriously, this practice never resulted in any type of solecism. (Listen to the ballet extracted from his score for "La Strada"; it is independent of its filmic context.) Yet changes do register in Rota's style. The two late-in-life Cello Concertos (1972 and 1973) do seem calculatedly more serious, a bit darker, than earlier compositions. Of the pair, the First Concerto is the weightiest, both in orchestration and character. Cellist Dmitry Yablonsky and I Virtuosi Italiani under Daniel Boico bring to the First Movement Allegro admirable energy ad commitment; the lyrical expansion midway through is particularly poignant. The Second Movement, Larghetto Cantabile, lives up to its designation; other instruments make significant solo contributions in partnership with the cello during its course. The movement is in the form of a theme and variations, with links to the First Movement. The boisterous Third Movement, another Allegro, also displays thematic ties with the First Movement, but it dispels the worries that have previously shadowed the extrovert elements of the score. It does this even in its fugal passages - quite jolly. The Second Concerto is slighter in texture. Yet its middle-movement Andante, another theme and variations (this time properly so-called), is expansive. It requires nearly a quarter of an hour in performance all by itself. Two charming movements in a non-astringent neoclassical vein enclose the central variations. Recommended"