https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDslVGf7OTQ
The National Symphony is doing a major online broadcast next week on Monday of Alfredo Casella's Second Symphony - written right before World War I and sounding like it. It might be a masterpiece, I need to hear it about ten more times to decide. When I first heard this performance, I was absolutely convinced that here was one of the neglected masterpieces of the 20th century, and then I heard Noseda do it live with the NSO two years ago, and I came away thinking that this may not be the greatest symphony ever written, but it is, without a doubt, the loudest.
That's doubly interesting because Casella's composition teacher was Mr. Relaxation himself, Gabriel Faure, while seated near him in that Paris Conservatoire class was George Enescu and Maurice Ravel. While in Paris he knew all the great figures of his time like Debussy, Stravinsky, Falla, but his biggest influences were all in Germany: Busoni, Mahler, and Strauss, and he had correspondance with all of them.
Casella was part of an Italian composition movement called the generazione dell'ottanta (the 'generation of 1880') - him, Malpiero, Pizetti, Alfano, and... Respighi, the only one of them still regularly played. Working in the giant shadows of Verdi and Puccini, and with the expanded orchestras of Tchaikovsky and Richard Strauss permeating everywhere in the world, with Toscanini and de Sabata raising the quality of Italian orchestras, the '80 generation was the first generation of Italian composers to primarily focus upon orchestral music. There has never again been a dominant Italian opera composer.
Like so much of the best music, there is something in Casella 2 which catches the zeitgeist in a way that seems almost alchemical. The constant church bells, insistent drum beats, military marches, and generally ominous atmosphere, there is something obviously Mahlerian about it, and no secret as to why, Casella was such a huge Mahler-head that he made a two-piano arrangement of the seventh symphony. There are also moments in the Second Symphony which sound like Rachmaninov and Shostakovich too, but there is also something clearly Italian - old church modes go all through the work in a way they obviously don't in Mahler or Shostakovich. If the long long melodies with sweeping strings sound like Rachmaninov, this is a symphony the land of opera - if anything, Rachmaninov was trying to sound like Italian music, not the other way around.
The particular way Casella uses bells and cymbals for color (and harps for percussion) is entirely original. The result sounds not entirely dissimilar from Respighi, but in many ways more sophisticated. This is a much more ambitious orchestral work than any by Respighi, and more original too. Let's face it, Respighi is known for his giant sonic monoliths which sound uncannily like the music Mussolini must have heard in his dreams, but Respighi's best stuff, like the Boticelli Tryptich, the Boutique Fantastique, The Birds, the Ancient Airs and Dances, is on a much smaller scale.
Casella is clearly a more complicated personality, more intellectually sophisticated, more international in his outlook. Casella's career was so varied that, he is simultaneously responsible for putting on concert series that launched the revival of Vivaldi in the 20th century (along with, believe it or not, Ezra Pound), making editions of keyboard works of both Bach and Beethoven, working on collaborative theater works with Pirandello and putting on new music series with Gabrielle d'Annunzio, being the pianist of what's probably Italy's most famous piano trio in those years - the very originally named Trio Italiano, accumulating an enormous art collection in his spare time, and also - if you can believe it... being the music director of the Boston Pops in the years before Arthur Fiedler. His music is a reflection of that gigantic wedding soup of activity, and therefore sounds like no one else's in the same way that Busoni's and Mahler's did in the generation before him. You may or may not find this symphony as fascinating as I do, but even if it follows the form of yet another giant early 20th century symphony, there is no symphony quite like this.
------------
Incidentally, Noseda is the greatest thing to ever happen to the National Symphony. He's frankly better than the current leadership at the Metropolitan Opera or the New York Philharmonic, so of course a larger organization is going to snap him up (probably the Covent Garden Opera in London) and like two-thirds of every other American orchestral golden ages, the conductor will leave before the good stuff even starts.
No comments:
Post a Comment