Roberto Noferini - Violin Sonatas - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Respighi Violin Sonatas, Composer Ottorino Respighi, Artist Fabio Paggioro violin, Massimiliano Ferrati piano, 1 CD, Ottorino Respighi is best known for his exuberant and expansive orchestral works, such as the Roman Trilogy, but he was also an important composer of chamber and salon music. His musical education began with him learning violin and piano as a child, and for the first 20 years of his career as a composer he only wrote for these instruments. He was an accomplished violinist, and his mastery of the instrument manifests itself in the idiomatic violin-writing heard in the works on this disc. Respighi's violin sonatas demonstrate the astonishingly wide range of his musical interests and the influences on his style from early music, through German Romanticism, to impressionist tone colors. They are also a showcase for his remarkable gift for melody. The D minor Sonata dates from Respighi's early period and contrasts lively and energetic outer movements with a gentle yet passionate Adagio. The B minor Sonata, composed 20 years later, is a grander, more intense and dramatic work, and is testimony to the mature Respighi's command of chamber music. The two violin sonatas are complemented by the Six Pieces for violin and piano these elegant and charming works show the lighter side O. Respighi. These works are performed by award-winning violinist Fabio Paggioro and acclaimed pianist Massimiliano Ferrati, who has been praised by the Corriere della Sera for his Inchhighly refined sound [that] turns to magicInch. Ottorino Respighi, gone into music history as a sorcerer of colorful orchestration, wrote a substantial oeuvre of chamber music works. A virtuoso violinist himself, he wrote two violin sonatas, which offer vintage Respighi an eclectic use of various styles, from modal early music, through romantic pathos, to impressionistic color experiments. Both sonata

A beloved trio of Romantic violin sonatas in the passionate and assured hands of an exciting Italian violinist near the start of her career an auspicious debut on Brilliant Classics. Winner of the 30th edition of Michelangelo Abbado violin competition held in Milan in 2009, Germana Porcu Morano studied in Bergamo, and has gone on to win several other national and international prizes included a scholarship funded by Claudio Abbado. She has performed as a soloist and in chamber ensembles across Europe and in China. She is a member of the Paganini String Quartet, with plans afoot to reco rd the completequartets by Paganini. In the meanwhile, Porcu Morano has produced a gripping account of the three violin sonatas by Edvard Grieg in partnership with one of the great Italian musicians of his generation, Bruno Canino. The pianist brings decades of experience to bear on parts which, especially in the testing Third Sonata, demand a virtuosity beyond anything in the Lyric Pieces. Meanwhile Porcu Morano's urgently communicative musicianship is well suited to works which exemplify the fascinating tension between Grieg's musical nationalism and his cosmopolitan outlook as a composer with colleagues and friends across Europe. There are Norwegian elements to all three sonatas - Grieg's teacher, Niels W Gade, even pronounced his verdict on the Second as 'too Norwegian' - but in counterbalance to the folk-like melodies which especially bring a rustic character to both slow movements and finales, there is a breadth of form and broad current of German romanticism to be appreciated in the first movements. Grieg himself took particular pride in the Third, a work of full maturity written in 1886 unlike the student efforts of the first two sonatas, and Porcu Morano's performance captures the composer's sense of it's 'broader horizons'

Although Giuseppe Tartini was taught the first rudiments of music at the College of the Padri dell Scuole Pie in Capodistria, and may have received lessons in counterpoint from the Franciscan Bohuslav Cernohorsky in Assisi, many elements give the impression that the boy had an education that was anything but 'academic,' and that the future 'maestro delle nazioni' largely taught himself. However, there does exist a declared model for the music of Tartini, at least for a certain period that of Corelli. His output seems dominated initially by the influence of his great predecessor in terms of both language and structure. The reference to folk music in his music is also obvious. Another interesting element in the sonatas presented on this is the presence of mottoes of varying length placed next to the incipits of certain movements, and often written in a ciphered cuneiform alphabet invented by the composer. These are poetic quotations, mostly drawn from the works of Metastasio, although not all of them have been identified. At the end of this recording is one of Tartini's very rare vocal pieces, the last composition copied into MS 1888/1. The poem Solitario bosco ombroso, based on a clearly Petrarchan model and on the classical antecedents of Tibullus and Propertius, was published for the first time by the poet Paolo Rolli in London in 1727, in a musical setting by Rolli himself.