DiamantEnsemblet - Chamber Music 1 - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Not least thanks to a growing catalogue of albums on Brilliant Classics, the multi-faceted work of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1970) is experiencing a renaissance. The guitar music he wrote for Segovia has until recently overshadowed the vocal and chamber pieces which speak with the composer's own voice, that of an Italian lyricist at heart whose intimate acquaintance with world literature and the whole history of music - he was fluent in at least six languages - lend cosmopolitan charm and a lightness of touch to a style encapsulated by '20th-century Impressionism'. Both the Cello Sonata Op.50 (1928) and the Second Piano Trio (1932) date from Castelnuovo-Tedesco's early maturity in Italy, when he was known as a musical man of parts, equally adept as a performer, a composer and a writer on music. The two-movement form of the Cello Sonata is unusual but successful, capitalizing on the solo instrument's propensity for long cantabile lines with a spaciously unfolding opening arioso, followed in Beethovenian fashion with an 'arietta con variazioni' that does indeed evoke a mood of 18th-century elegance. The G minor Piano Trio, as befits it's key signature, is a much more turbulent work, even in it's central Romance with variations. Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed his Clarinet Sonata towards the end of the Second World War, having emigrated to the US in 1938, in flight from Mussolini's persecution of the Jews. He appears not to have had a particular performer in mind, though the clarinet was enjoying new-found status as a solo instrument due to Benny Goodman's commissioning of pieces from the likes of Copland and Milhaud, and his colleague on the composing staff at MGM Studios, Nathaniel Shillkret, was also a fine clarinetist. The Sonata's Classical four-movement structure is infused with Romantic melody, shimmering piano textures and jazz-inflected harmonies.

The music on this CD confirms the special position of the composer Jorgen Jersild (1913-2004) in Danish music. It is captivating chamber music written over a half-century during which the composer underwent great musical development, but at the same time persisted in his own personal style - from the early works from the 1930s and 1940s to the later string quartet showing US a courageous, mature composer seeking out new musical areas.

The Milanese composer Riccardo Malipiero was born in Milan in 1914 and took lessons with his uncle, Gian Francesco Malipiero in the late 30s. Malipiero disowned all that he wrote up until 1938 and saved only a small amount of that written before 1945 the surviving early pieces show the influence of his uncle's teaching and the neo-classicism of Casella and Stravinsky. However, influenced by Luigi Dallapiccola, he came to embrace a personal, lyrical language of 12-tone composition which ultimately traces it's roots back to the music of Berg. The four-movement Violin Sonata from 1956 makes an ideal introduction to Riccardo Malipiero's music, with a nervous, waltz-like Scherzo and a frozen slow movement leading into the finale's extensive violin cadenza, beautifully written for the instrument and played here by Rebecca Raimondi with burning conviction as well as ferocious accuracy (she included the sonata within her Master's recital at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, from which she graduated in 2017). At her graduation recital she was accompanied by Alessandro Viale, and together with the other members of the Rest Ensemble they have given concerts of Malipiero's music in both the UK and Italy, lending to these studio recordings the ring of intimacy and impassioned authenticity that is rare in recordings of unfamiliar modernist music. The Piano Trio of 1969 sets a tougher challenge to both performers and listeners, more angular and explosive, yet still imbued with a strain of wit and grace that runs through his output.