LAURETO RODONI

BOOKLET CD

MATTIA ZAPPA
MASSIMILIANO MAINOLFI

ENGLISH VERSION

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ALFREDO CASELLA

CELLO SONATA OP. 45

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When, in the autumn of 1915, Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) was called to Rome to fulfil the role of piano teacher at Santa Cecilia music school, after 19 years' stay in France in close contact with the European artistic avant-garde, he decided that the right moment had come to move towards the «de-provincialisation» of the Italian scene, giving it back its sense of instrumental music in a period when opera, based on obsolete veristic stereotypes, still reigned. After organising concerts featuring music by contemporary composers (Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky...), often bringing upon himself «antipathy and even hatred from the co-national mediocrity» [1], he founded the Italian Society of Modern Music (1917-1919), which also published a journal: «Ars Nova». The association had as its objectives the performance and printing of the most interesting works by young composers, the «re-familiarisation» with forgotten works of the past and the establishment of a system of musical exchange between similar organisations of other countries. Thanks once again to Casella's initiative, together with Malipiero's, an even more ambitious project of musical diffusion started in 1923: the «Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche» (The New Music Corporation). The project - enthusiastically supported by D'Annunzio - soon came to be recognised as the Italian section of the newly-founded International Society of Contemporary Music. Casella's activity was «one of the most productive and multilateral that an Italian musician had ever realised» remarked Roman Vlad. Other musicians aimed to similar results, but it was only in him that composition, interpretation, culture, didactics and organisation of musical life were «different aspects of one action thus constituting a focal point in the Italian musical 'Renaissance'» (Fedele D'Amico).
Although today we tend to consider Casella's works a collection without interior continuity, we can however affirm, also on the basis of the composer's memoir, that this Sonata belongs to his «third style». After a phase of harmonic enthusiasm, which brought him to the atonal and dodecaphonic border, in the spring of 1923 the «wonderful nature of Tuscany» made him learn «definitively... that the clear transparency of the landscape was the same as the one of our art». This experience, combined with his late discovery of Italian Art (architecture and painting), bore fruit also on a creative level. As Massimo Mila wrote: "It is on the basis of this new stylistic clarification, corresponding to a psychological upheaval, that Casella created his best known masterpieces in giocoso style, such as 'La Giara' (1924), 'Scarlattiana', 'Partita', 'Concerto Romano' (1926) and 'Sonata per Violoncello and Pianoforte'. In this compositions,» continues Mila, «spiritual and physical health is expressed in the exuberance and vivacity of rhythm, love in the dynamism, precision and richness of the instrumental colour, perfect control of the musical material, and therefore the fundamental optimism which prevents any affectation of excessive sentimentalism if not sufficiently elaborated and transfigured into artistic dignity.» Even in «Partita» (1926), however, the giocoso style is tempered by moments when «the tragic inspiration, although keeping its characteristic of pronounced dynamism, often takes the place of the burlesque [...], but it is quite far from the catastrophic pessimism of the romantic period»: this is a stylistic characteristic which also appears in the first movement of the Sonata per Violoncello e Pianoforte, op. 45.
This composition is divided into two major parts, which are in turn divided into two movements, the first one being slow and the second fast. The first part, beginnings with a superb Prelude, is introduced by a solemn piano theme which is suddenly interrupted in the thirteenth bar to allow a «libera con fantasia» entry on the cello. In the brief «più mossa» central section a vague sense of restlessness appears. The rhythm progressively becomes more «agitato», and when it reaches its peak, the initial theme is repeated by the two instruments simultaneously, ending with a dark and mysterious musical colour, highlighted by the trills of the cello. The uninhibited bourrée which follows (almost without «solutions of continuity»), with its binary rhythm underlined by the obsessive staccati and staccatissimi, consitutes a vehement antithesis of the previous part. Only in the central part does the joviality tend to darken, exploding in the final bars which, cyclically, take up the opening theme again.
The second part, introduced with strong expression by a few bars on the piano, is a «largo» containings contemplative moments, that are sometimes, dark and «deaf», and concludes in an atmosphere of extreme and evocative rarefaction of sound, interrupted by the attacco in the final Rondo, an «allegro molto vivace», almost a Jig recalling, with its brilliant dance-like character, the closing piece of ancient Suites. As in the «Bourrée», staccato prevails, but in a context of predominantly ternary rhythm.
This Sonata is an admirable example of the style which Casella defined as «rather Baroque in its monumentality», and contains all the elements («sense of importance [...] of the light/shade», «liberty and fantasy in the interpretation of classical forms», «a predilection for certain violent plastic contrasts») which determine a reaction to impressionism, to the «seduction of the symphonic poem and all that accompanies this form [...] - virtuosity, ornamentation and, above all, what is extraneous to music». With its colours and changing atmospheres, obtained also by the clever use of chromaticism, it evokes, not without nostalgic moments but more often with calmness and serenity, the musical splendour of times past (remembering that Casella, in his mature years, enjoyed defining himself as a «real disciple of Bach and Vivaldi's»). The lively rhythms, on the one hand, re-present old forms shrewdly utilised, on the other they express a love of dynamism, in the spiritual sense: a fundamentally optimistic vision of reality and therefore a strong trust in the future of Art. The abrupt conclusion with an irony flavoured risoluto seems to reduce and almost mock the interior bendings, the restlessness and vague melancholy which previously emerged.


FERRUCCIO BUSONI

KULTASELLE, TEN SHORT VARIATIONS
FOR CELLO AND PIANO, KIV 237
Busoni (Empoli,Tuscany 1866 - Berlin 1924) studied in the ideally cosmopolitan Germanic-Central European sphere and is famous, above all, for having been one of the greatest pianist of all time. He was, however, a prolific composer, a transcriber and editor of works by Bach and other musicians. He was also a poet, an essayist, a musical philosopher, a conductor, a piano and composition teacher, a cultural operator, a refined bibliophile, a collector of art works and a generous patron of artists. For the vastness of his interests and his numerous activities in the musical and literary fields, he is often compared to the Renaissance artists.
According to Roman Vlad, Busoni, as a philosopher, reaches «some of the highest peaks of all time in musical thinking». Edgard Varèse, who was significantly influenced by his aesthetics wrote in 1966: «Everywhere in his writings, one can find prophesies about future music that turned out to be correct. In fact, there has been no development that he did not predict.» His brief writings about aesthetics played a fundamental role in the field of the historical avant-gardes of the first years of the twentieth century, and constitute a theoretical point of reference for many artists, not only in the musical field.
The articles, the essays, the more than ten thousand letters, the testimonials of those who knew him and the recent critical-biographical studies indisputably prove that he was one of the most lucid and perspicacious witnesses of the time. Arnold Schoenberg, who had been in contact with Busoni for several years, in 1912 defined him as «undoubtedly a genius; in any case, the best I have ever met».
In April 1888, notwithstanding his young age (22 years), Busoni was given the post of piano teacher at Helsinki Conservatory. He found the level of the musical institute extremely low. Although fulfilling his role with great commitment, he was not able to improve the situation as he had hoped. He had also difficulty in entering the provincial mentality of the city which didn't offer him much in the artistic sense. For this reason he felt alone, disoriented and depressed: «This solitude», he wrote to his mother, «even if interrupted by the things I have to do, is terrible. In the evening, when I have finished my work, I have to rest, doing nothing for one or two hours, and afterwards I feel a terrible sense of emptiness». Not even his sensational success as a pianist could appease his discomfort and bad mood. Among the few people who were in intense contact with him and helped him get over the discomfort of living in a less than congenial environment, Busoni met conductor Richard Faltin and Jean Sibelius. He kept a life-long and heartly friendship with the latter.
His creative activity was not very intense in that period: paradoxically, only in the whirlpool of the metropolis was he able to compose without difficulty - an activity which, even at the age of 22 he considered more important than the pianist or didactic career: «What is most important», he added in the above-mentioned letter, «is the willingness and the attempt not to neglect composition, my "everything", the definitive aim of my existence, without which anything I have done up to now would be almost worthless».
In March 1889 his existential and emotive state changed radically. He met Gerda Sjöstrand, his future wife: it was love at first sight, and an irresistible passion developed. Busoni defined the months after their first meeting as the most beautiful in his life, on a human level. Gerda was attractive, cultured and bright, sensitive and reserved, and became a faithful companion. She was patient and energetic at the same time - «ready to sacrifice and dare to do anything possible to help realise my ambitions», whilst she was never submissive. The innumerable letters that Ferruccio wrote to her recall «the deepness of the spiritual and affective exchange, the rewarding and total communion with a person who, after fulfilling her ideal as a women and a wife, became a confidant, a companion, and an indispensable moral and material support» (Sergio Sablich).
Probably between the spring and the summer of 1890, soon before leaving for Moscow, where he was to marry Gerda and teach piano at the Conservatory, he composed Kultaselle, ten short cello and piano variations based on a popular Finnish theme. That brief but pregnant chamber music piece, though not having an opus number (it is number 237 in Kindermann's catalogue) was perhaps the only composition dating back to his youth, to which Busoni always remained attached, and in 1910 dedicated four bars of it to the then thirteen year old cellist Enrico Mainardi. The reasons for this attachment are two: one is artistic, because of the remarkable musical quality of the composition; another is human, as it was his only composition dedicated to Gerda: actually in Finnish «Kultaselle» means «to my loved one» and in 1890 such person could only have been his future wife.
In a printed copy (1891) which can be found in the Busoni-Nachlass (State Library of Berlin) there are important corrections written by the composer himself that were never taken into consideration by the publishing house in the subsequent editions. Only recently has Professor Joachim Draheim of the University of Karlsruhe used Busoni's corrections to construct a critical edition of the work, from which numerous mistakes have finally been removed. The present recording is based on the definitive version published by Breitkopf & Hartel.
The popular theme of Kultaselle is delicate and full of melancholy, and the variations create fascinating, exotic atmospheres evoking ancient heroic songs, but they perhaps reveal autobiographical torments too, connected with the vehemence of the passion that shines through some of his letters in that period: «I thought of you with great intensity» he wrote, for instance, in June 1899 «I literally suffer. [...] Oh, love me faithfully, intensely, constantly - it is the only thing I ask of you: in exchange, you can have from me anything I possess; be only my woman, and belong body and soul only to me. Can you understand? To me alone. In exchange I will devote my whole life to you».
The variations follow almost without solution of continuity and in a very free way, with imperceptible passages from major to minor keys - a style which often reappears in later compositions. The structure of this work is made up of three parts, due to the presence of two pauses with coronas. The first part, with its theme in C minor acting as a prelude, is a sort of ascending climax which abruptly concludes at the end of the second variation; the central one begins as an antithesis - serene and relaxed - becoming more lively in the middle, then closing mournfully in an atmosphere of estranged sonority: a vision that, on the one hand, evokes certain atmospheres of the slow movements in Beethoven sonatas (nos. 4 & 5 in particular), and, on the other, disconcertingly anticipates the mature Busoni of Elegie; the last part, which is rhythmically aggressive, is again an ascending climax underlined by the dynamic or expressive indications such as feroce (fierce), agitato, martellato, crescendo, sempre crescendo, più crescendo, which make the composition precipitate towards a peremptory chord of the two instruments, finally reunited in the initial key.

GIAN FRANCESCO MALIPIERO

CELLO AND PIANO SONATINA
Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973), defined by Dallapiccola as «the most important personality that Italy has ever had after the death of Verdi», was one of the longest-living and most prolific composers of all time. He studied in Venice and Bologna, and had the possibility of studying at the Vienna Conservatory (1898-1899) and in Berlin (1908-1909), where he met Ferruccio Busoni on two occasions. Busoni had a notable influence on his way of conceiving art works: in particular, Malipiero was fascinated by the combination of styles, registers and contrasting influences in the work Busoni was composing in that period: Die Brautwahl. Another fundamental experience on an artistic and human level was his stay in Paris in 1913, where he heard, stupefied and moved, Le sacre du printemps, met Casella, D'Annunzio (and Busoni again) and entered into contact with the European musical world. Despite this experience, which was decisive for his artistic maturity, Malipiero always remained an isolated musician.
He was also an extremely diffident person: «No human being exists, either friend or foe, to whom I have confessed any sort of secret. I have two or three friends I trust, but even with them I have never spoken about anything, though in my life I have had difficult moments» (23.5.1922). «Cave canem? Cave hominem!» is the noteworthy title of a piece of his memoirs. Among the «two or three friends» there was certainly Casella, with whom he was on the front line in the arduous task of «de-provincialising» and rebuilding Italian music. «Notwithstanding my good friendship with Alfredo Casella», he wrote in 1968 «I have no musical link with him. I like many of his works - I listen to them happily (which means a lot for me), but we were always poles apart, and perhaps the musical distance united us.»
His relationship with Fascism was complex and often conflictual. He was anti-conformist and anti-dogmatic, therefore he was not appreciated by the regime, not only for his experimental and avant-garde past, but also for the characteristics of his music, which was too distant from the «right currents». In most of his writings he expressed bitterness towards Italy which ignored him: «Even though I have kept up the good name of Italy abroad, I have received only dishonourable things from my country» (3.13.1931). Four years before he had written: «My work have been printed by the Universal Edition (of Vienna) and I am a foreigner for the Italians. I think it is my fault, since I do not want to exchange favours» (27.3.1927). «Today one can recognise» wrote Cecilia Palandri «why and how difficult it was for Malipiero to live under the regime, as it was the case for the intellectuals who, though not adhering ideologically to fascism, were not sufficiently motivated towards forms of resistance such as exile [...] and were thus "compelled" to seek forms of compromise, suffer in silence, or even ambiguously collaborate, though unwillingly.÷ Malipiero himself tried to explain his often condescending behaviour towards the regime: «He who goes to live in a newly built house, and faithfully transports all that he owns - is he responsible if the building collapses? Is he guilty of having trusted in the architect? Who could have imagined that the materials were faulty and inevitably destined to crumble?». He courageously spent the period of German occupation (1943-1945) inside the conservatory, being able, thanks to his prestige, to help teachers and students avoid military service and concentration camps. «I confess», he wrote on this subject, «that since the 28th of April, I have waited for someone to come and thank me for what I did for the Benedetto Marcello Conservatory during the war.»
Owing to the vastness of his influences (from Gregorian chant to German expressionism, from his beloved Monteverdi to the Venetian eighteenth century) he is a musician who is difficult to classify. Newerteleness, the stylistic variety of his works converges in a superior expressive unit, in an unmistakeably personal musical language, whose trait is, on the one hand, the coexistence of the archaic element with the latest conquests of harmonic language (atonalism, politonalism, sporadically also dodecaphony), on the other hand, the rejection of every pre-existing form and, above all, the abolition of the principle «of conventional thematic development: ideas are presented, they say all that they have to say and never return» (28.6.1917). Secondly, they had "saturated" and bored him. «Hit on a theme», he later remarked «turning it, breaking it into pieces, enlarging it - it is not difficult to construct the movement of a symphony (or a sonata) which amateurs enjoy and which satisfies the connoisseurs' insensitivity».
Sonatina, composed in 1942 and dedicated to Enrico Mainardi, was, surprisingly, the only merely instrumental piece of some importance that Malipiero composed in that period and «can be considered as a solitary and feeble link between his prolific instrumental production of the thirties and his renewed instrumental richness of the late forties» (Waterhouse). It is divided into three movements without continuity: two short fast and lively sections (Allegro piuttosto mosso - Allegro, vivace, ma non troppo mosso) frame a longer central section: Lento - Molto tranquillo, quasi largo - Un poco meno lento. The unity of the piece is reinforced by a sort of harmonic leitmotiv, made up of two chords of the piano that return several times, either identical or varied, in crucial structural points of the composition. Despite the date of the composition, this work doesn't seem to be connected with the events of war, even though the composer wrote that «the war doesn't allow one to live in peace even with oneself» and that he never hid his «desperation about the events which threatened to destroy Italy». The atmosphere is relaxed, without tension and brilliant in its extreme movements. Only in three bars of the lento movement, located in the central part, in a strategic position in the structural sense, a rapid and dramatic descent in demisemiquavers from the forte to fortissimo of the cello and the following lugubrious chords of the piano, do seem to evoke the wounds inflicted on his country by the barbary of war. Immediately afterwards the atmosphere becomes serene again and the Sonatina ends joyously with an allegro vivace where the ternary rhythm is highlighted by the staccato and staccatissimo of the two instruments and by the frequent pizzicatos of the cello.

LUCIANO CHAILLY

CELLO AND PIANO
TRI-THEME SONATA NO. 5

Luciano Chailly was born in Ferrara on the nineteenth of February 1920. He was, and still is, an acute observer of developments in contemporary music without, however, siding with anyone: he has always kept far away from the excesses of experimentalism for its own sake. Paul Hindemith's teaching (he furthered his study of counterpoint under him, was decisive in his artistic development: he was, however, always able to temper it in his compositions «thanks to an innate expressive sense which accentuate the rigorous polyphonic articulation with pathos, as it happens in the series of the Sonate tritematiche» (Cresti).
Passing through several historical styles with critical consciousness and rare sensitivity, Chailly has been able to develop a personal, composite, original, but still coherent musical language, where he expresses the existential condition of our time, sounded with psycho-analytical profundity. That occurs not only in his theatrical works, characterised by «an orchestral palette which leaves nothing to chance in its timbric effects» (Montale), by «an extraordinary sound ambientation and atmospheres which are, at times, hallucinating», where «events meet the ambiguity and the uncertainty of what may seem real, but it is not» (Mosso), but also in other musical genres: let us think for example of Es-Konzert (1984) in which the composer is inspired by the Freudian theories of personality.
On a human and artistic level the decisive friendship with writer Dino Buzzati (in addition to that with Hindemith), which started in 1954 and lasted many years, furnished him with four opera librettos, and influenced his poetical world in the oneiric, allegorical and surrealist sense. Cechov's and Ionesco's works also had a fertile influence on his Weltanschauung. Similar to G.F. Malipiero in the thirties, Chailly also moved with fervour towards Pirandello's dramatic art and philosophy. In 1975, he wrote a single act work based on the play «Sogno (ma forse no)». This work «signals an important moment of my evolution, and, more precisely, the beginning [...] of a "third way". The first one had been the neo-classical, post-"hindemithian"; the second, the dodecaphonic type; the third, from an expressive point of view, was of a "sound hallucination" and from a technical point of view of a watered-down serialism on structures, which, if not always deformed, were deformalised.»
Renzo Cresti divides Chailly's instrumental music into two categories: one is based on rhapsodical forms where introspective, oneiric, fantastic and pathetic elements prevail, and another where a more rigorous form dominates, being connected with past models and based on counterpoint. The twelve Sonate tritematiche cycle, composed between 1951 and 1962, belongs to the second type: a «monumental operation», continues Cresti, «in which Chailly bears the fruit of Hindemith's lessons and inserts himself into European musical culture (especially in the Gebrauchmusik)». The latter term, coined by Hindemith himself, can be translated with the expression «music for use»: one of the Ferrarian Maestro's primary aims was, indeed, to «bring music closer to people, maybe giving it back a real social function in the modern world, taking it away from "museum" aestheticism which the worldly institution of concerts has given it, and inserting it, once again, into people's everyday life, as medieval Christianity and a few ancient cultures were able to do» (Mila).
«The idea of a three-theme structure» as Chailly wrote in a letter to the performers Zappa and Mainolfi on the twenty-second of February 2000 «came to me in 1951. As a matter of fact, the famous music critic (and one of my admirers) Giulio Confalonieri gave me the idea, when he said: 'You have imagination, you trust neo-classicism: why do you not try and invent a new form?' In this way the Piano Sonata Tritematica no. 1 was born: it was brief, almost schematic, with the precise aim of reconciling, in a single movement, the principles of the sonata first movement with the ones of the fugue.»
The Tritematica no. 5 was composed in Milan in 1954. The classical sonata, conceived as a unitary structure, is renewed but not unhinged. Actually, as Chailly notes again, the general scheme of this glorious musical form, differing from what occurs in Casella's and Malipiero's works, is still faithfully followed: Introduction (with a hint of the third theme) - 1st Theme (serene and cordial) - Development - 2nd Theme (allegro agitato) - Simultaneous development of the two themes - 3rd Theme (melancholic Largo) - Synthetic development of the three themes - Stretti (between the first two ideas) - Conclusion.
In short, we are dealing with a sort of musical reflection on the sonata form in which the theme of memory, and thus the relationship between present and past, becomes central, as in Casella's works.
Chailly concludes by affirming that the composition «is conceived in a language of free atonalism, not dodecaphonic. On an expressive level the distant memory of Hindemith is overtaken by a vivacity and by a typically Italian luminosity». Cresti, on his turn, highlights the fact that both the disposition of the thematic motives, and that of the expressive zones are dialectic, as they alternate and link moments of emotive and dramatic tension with relaxed and serene moments: «it is in the latter (moments) that Chailly expresses his cantabile vein, giving way to evident and enveloping melodic parts, without sacrificing virtuostic parts, strong tensions, excited and changeable motion» and to the colours, to which the composers pays constant attention.

Tradizione di Christopher Williams con la consulenza di Serena Caramitti.

1. The quotations which do not feature the author's name are taken from the work «I segreti della giara» (Florence, 1941)
2. Every reference to Malipiero's letters with a precise date is taken from the Archivio Rodoni in Biasca (Switzerland).