Riccardo Bartoli - Italian Clarinet Suites - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Circumstances including an overwhelming preoccupation with opera at the expense of instrumental music, two world wars and the rise of a Fascist dictatorship, resulted in a generation of Italian chamber music composers born between the 1880s and early 1900s whose music seemed to vanish without a trace. Featured on this , they include virtuoso composer-performers, such as Ferdinando Busoni, father of Ferruccio, renowned pedagogues, and composers persecuted for their Jewish origins. This is Sergio Bosi's fifth album for Naxos in a series devoted to restoring to the repertoire forgotten and rarely-performed Italian clarinet works from the second half of the 19th century to the present day. Album Tracks 1. Fantasia Rapsodica 2. Solo Dramatique, Op. 13 (1879) 3. Andante Con Moto in E minor, Op. 10 (1877) 4. Inquiétude, 'Étude Mélodique' (1930) (Version for Clarinet and Piano) 5. 28 Grandi Studi Tecnici E Melodici Da Concerto in Forma Moderna (1936) 6. Arabesca 7. Rêverie Pastorale (1870) 8. Fantasia in B Flat Major (1936) 9. Preludio in E Flat Major 10. Acquerello 11. Villanella (1921) (Version for Clarinet and Piano) 12. 12 Variazioni Sopra Un Tema Di Schubert, Op. 19 (Version for Clarinet and Piano) 13. Romanza Lidica

Album Tracks 1. Adagio 2. Fuga Allegro 3. Siciliana 4. Presto 5. Allemande 6. Double 7. Corrente 8. Double Presto 9. Sarabande 10. Double 11. Tempo Di Borea 12. Double 13. Grave 14. Fuga 15. Andante 16. Allegro 1. Allemande 2. Corrente 3. Sarabande 4. Giga 5. Largo 6. Allegro Assai 7. Preludio 8. Largo 9. Allegro Assai 10. Preludio 11. Loure 12. Gavotte en Rondeau 13. Menuet I and II 14. Bourree 15. Gigue

The most recent and longest of the works heard here quite possibly makes the longest musical journey as well. The Clarinet Concerto (2001), subtitled Landscape with Blues, was commissioned by the IRIS Chamber Orchestra for Richard Stoltzman. In offering the commission, the orchestra's Executive Director, Albert Pertalion, asked for a work that might reflect in some way on the heritage of Mississippi Delta Blues. As the composer notes fondly, Inchhe even took me on a whirlwind tour of blues country to get a feel for the birthplace of one of America's greatest musical traditions. From that trip, I took away an indelible sense of the countryside, the heat and humidity, the purple martens chasing mosquitoes at twilightInch. But in it's realization, the piece goes much farther afield than that. It starts in the West African nations of Senegal and The Gambia, or InchSenegambiaInch as they are sometimes known, with their great musical story-telling tradition known as griot singing, audibly one of the roots of American blues. These audible links are heard in their repetitive accompaniment patterns and rhythmically free, declamatory vocal melodies that tend to begin high then work themselves down to a lower register. Here, Hartke casts the clarinet solo as the griot, with the woodwinds engaging in a sort of call and response chorus, all built over a repeated five-note bass line. The second movement, entitled Delta Nights recalls Hartke's impressions of the Delta, but just as importantly owes much to the novel, Train Whistle Guitar, by Albert Murray, about his boyhood in a small African-American community near the Delta during the heyday of the great itinerant bluesmen. Hartke writes InchIn Delta Nights, the soloist evokes a blues harmonica wailing away in the night, and even the structure of the movement is loosely related to a series of blues choruses. Moreover, some of the