Casella, Alfredo

Casella, Alfredo

Concerto Romano Op. 43 for organ & orchestra

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29,00 

Preface

Casella, Alfredo – Concerto Romano Op. 43 for organ & orchestra

Sterling pianist, protean composer, broad-minded conductor, crack organizer, incisive writer, painstaking editor: Alfredo Casella was all these things at once, and as such he was the commanding figure in modern Italian music during the first half of the twentieth century. He was born into an affluent upper-bourgeois family with strong ties to music and the arts (his Christian name, Alfredo, was taken from his godfather, the great nineteenth-century cellist Alfredo Piatti). By the age of eleven he was already capable of playing both books of the Well-Tempered Klavier by heart. Still, his interests centered on a career in the natural sciences until 1895, when he heard the Italian première of Götterdämmerung under Toscanini. Thereafter his passion for music became insatiable, and he was sent to Pais in 1896 as a young teenager to perfect his training. By 1900, still a teenager, he had become a student of Gabriel Fauré and formed what would become a lifelong friendship with his elder contemporary, Maurice Ravel. He also excelled as a pianist, especially in chamber-music recitals with the great string players Eugène Ysaye and Pablo Casals. With his wide-ranging intelligence he became an early champion of the Futurist writer Marinetti, and yet was one of the first to recognize Mahler’s genius as a composer, even preparing a piano four-hand arrangement of the Seventh Symphony (it was published by Bote & Bock in 1910). The respect was mutual: it was Mahler who recommended Casella to the Viennese publishing house Universal Edition, thereby placing him at the front rank of the progressive composers of his day.

Until that time Casella’s compositions had been thoroughly competent essays in late romanticism and impressionism with a strong bent toward eclectic stylistic mélanges. This was to change in 1913, when he became acquainted with Schoenberg’s music and attended the scandal-ridden première of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps in Paris. A lifelong friendship ensued between the two composers: Casella would write not one but two biographies of his great Russian contemporary (1926 and 1947) and conduct the Italian premières of Petrushka, L’Histoire du soldat, and Les Noces. His own music underwent a sea-change that was perhaps most apparent in Pupazzetti op. 27 (1915), a set of short piano duets composed for a performance of marionettes. Though clearly indebted to Le Sacre, the work struck a novel and disquieting tone that foreshadows much of the anti-romantic reaction of the Twenties. …

 

 

… Read preface / Vorwort > HERE

Score Data

Edition

Repertoire Explorer

Genre

Solo Instrument(s) & Orchestra

Pages

140

Size

160 x 240 mm

Printing

Reprint

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