★★★★
Name an Italian symphonist. Go on, quickly, just one.
There were plenty in Mozart’s time, nothing much since. The market shifted to opera and those who wrote abstract music were left to embrace obscurity.
My attention was arrested this week by a German orchestra performing a pair of Italians who persisted with non-vocal music against all commercial algorithms. Ottorino Respighi (1879-1936) achieved tourist-class renown with symphonic poems on Roman landmarks and an ode to the brutish Mussolini. Respighi is represented here by a meditation on three Boticelli paintings, one more exquisite than the next. If you hear a Christmas carol in the middle, you are not mistaken.
Lovelier still is Respighi’s orchestration of five etudes by Rachmaninov — not so much gilding a pianistic lily as liberating the inner symphonist in Sergei’s long fingers. The beauty here is unbounded and the Bamberg Symphony play under Riccardo Frizza like a Porsche with a Ferrari designer.
A real symphony closes the show. Giuseppe Martucci, who died in 1909, left two symphonies. The first, performed here, has light Elgarian touches; the second is distinctly Mahlerian. Mahler himself conducted Martucci’s Notturno in his final lifetime concert. Nothing else by Martucci gets heard much these days, although Riccardo Muti used to be an enthusiast. This performance is a taste of what might have been if more Italians had resisted the siren call of opera. The first Martucci symphony is almost-great music, never taxing one’s patience. Bamberg’s solo cello and clarinet are sensational.
