Italian Festival

Description

Italian FestivalJules Massenet (1842 - 1912)Suite No.5: Sc?¿nes napolitainesLa danse La procession et L'improvisateur La f?¬te Benjamin Godard (1849 - 1895)Sc?¿nes italiennes Serenade florentine Sicilienne TarantelleFelix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809 - 1847)Gondolier's Song Franz Liszt (1809 - 1886)Tarantelle Ruggiero Leoncavallo (1857 - 1919)MattinataCesar Cui (1853 - 1918)Tarantelle Gustave Charpentier (1860 - 1956)Impressions d'ltalie (No.5 Naples) Charles Gounod (1818 - 1893)SaltarelloLuigi Denza (1846 - 1922)Funiculi, funiculaWith two exceptions the musical pictures ofItaly included in the Italian Festival are the work of foreigners who foundfascination and inspiration in the country. Jules Massenet, the son of a manwho made his fortune in the manufacture of scythes and later lost much of it,captures the magic of the Italian dance, Italian opera and drama, and religiouslife in the three scenes from Naples that form his fifth orchestral suite,written in 1876. His victory in the Prix de Rome in Paris in 1863, brought himopportunity to travel in Italy, of which he and his companions took advantage.The stay in Italy brought the first of his orchestral suites, Pompeia, of obvious enough provenance. TheNeapolitan scenes were the product of the next decade, written at the outset ofhis successful career as a composer of opera and exhibiting the markedtechnical skill he always possessed, his deft handling of the orchestra andfacility in melodic invention. Benjamin Godard, a Parisian by birth, failedto win that mark of official French approval, the Prix de Rome, but won himselfan early reputation as a composer of salon music and as a viola-player ofdistinction. As a composer his talent was for lighter music, and attempts atanything more weighty were not entirely successful. The three Italian scenesinclude a Florentine serenade, a delicately elegant version of the traditionalshepherd dance of Sicily, long adopted into Northern European instrumentalrepertoire, and the frenetic Neapolitan dance, the Tarantella.A precocious child of rich parents, FelixMendelssohn completed his education with a Grand Tour, spending months inItaly, where he was able to write his evocative Italian Symphony, while working on another travel symphonyinspired by Scotland, a country he had visited the year before his stay inItaly. The Gondolier's Song isarranged for orchestra from one of the popular Songswithout Words, piano pieces of original conception, with theminiature perfection of songs, but relying on the more abstract art of musicalone.Franz Liszt, atrue cosmopolitan, was born in Hungary, moved to Vienna, and then to Paris,which remained his home through adolescence, when he was not travelling as avirtuoso pianist. A liaison with a married woman set him on years of travel-years of pilgrimage, he was to call them - and above all to Italy. Here hefound inspiration, if not in his mistress, whom he was later to send back toParis, in the poems of Petrarch,the pictures of Salvat