Casella: Paganiniana / Serenata / La Giara

Italian Rso

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Cat No: 8553706

Release Date: 01 January 2000

Label: Naxos / Naxos Classics

Packaging Type: Jewel Case

No of Units: 1

Barcode: 730099470629

Genres: Classical

Composer/Series: CASELLA

Description
Alfredo Casella (1883-1947)Paganiniana Op. 65Serenata Op. 46bisLa Giara Op. 41bisBorn into a musical family in Turin, Alfredo Casella showed early ability asa pianist. His father, like his two uncles, paternal grandfather and godfather,Alfredo Piatti, was distinguished as a cellist, but it was from his mother thathe had his early piano lessons. At the age of twelve, on the advice of thecomposer, pianist and conductor Giuseppe Martucci, director of the LiceoMusicale in Bologna and a family friend, and of the old violinist AntonioBazzini, director of the Milan Conservatory, it was decided that he should studyat the Paris Conservatoire. With the death of his father in 1896, after someyears of illness, he and his mother moved to Paris, where, in November, he beganhis studies. There, in 1901-1902, he attended the composition class of GabrielFaure, while from the beginning he had studied the piano with Louis Diemer andharmony with Xavier Leroux. He remained in Paris for some nineteen years,associating with Ravel and with the Romanian George Enescu, admiring Debussy andthe Russian Stravinsky, but above all at first influenced by Mahler and RichardStrauss, and by performances of Wagner he had first heard in Turin underToscanini. After leaving the Conservatoire in 1902 he embarked on a career as apianist and harpsichordist, primarily working in chamber music and as anaccompanist. It was at this period that he wrote his first two symphonies. In1911 he embarked on an intended series of popular symphony concerts at theTrocadero, conducting, as he had done intermittently over previous years, butthe series had to be abandoned after the first five concerts. The generalartistic atmosphere of Paris had its influence on him and the weightierinfluence of Mahler and Strauss was replaced by that of composers such asStravinsky and Albeniz, all of which suggests a certain eclecticism.Casella 's career in Paris reached a height of contemporary distinction withthe 1914 performance of his song-cycle Nolle di Maggio, a setting for lowvoice and orchestra of poems by Giosue Carducci, a scholar and writer who haddevoted his attention to a patriotic revival of interest in the Italian past.The work had a mixed reception. By 1915 Casella had realised that his future layin Italy. In that year he settled in Rome, teaching the piano at the LiceoMusicale di Sta Cecilia until 1923 and thereafter, during the following decade,responsible for a master-class at the Liceo. It was here that he found himself afigure of importance in a circle of young Italian musicians who shared hisambition to bring a country that generally seemed musically provincial andbackward into the mainstream of the European music with which he had beenfamiliar in Paris.In 1917 Casella established the Societa Nazionale di Musica, which laterbecame the Societa ltaliana di Musica Moderna and then, in 1923, he set up, withrather different aims, the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche, affiliated to theInternational Society
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