Nino Rota: Chamber Music
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Like Bernard Herrmann with Alfred Hitchcock, Nino Rota (1911-79) will be forever associated with Federico Fellini, though he wrote for other directors too, among them René Clément, Luchino Visconti, and Francis Ford Coppola, for the latter the haunting main theme from 1972's The Godfather. Even so, it's Rota's soundtrack work for Fellini, a relationship that began in 1952 with The White Sheik, that has cemented the composer's reputation. But also like Herrmann, Rota longed to be recognized for his non-filmic material and be taken seriously as a twentieth-century composer in the pure sense. Recordings such as this hour-long collection of chamber music go a long way towards fulfilling that goal when the material holds up perfectly well alongside other works in the contemporary classical canon.

Any listener who's been enraptured by a haunting Rota melody in a Fellini film will come to Chamber Music hoping to hear some of that in its pieces too, and traces of it do arise now and then. Like Rota's film-related writing, much of the album's material is irreverent and playful—though sober episodes also appear. Eleven musicians—four woodwinds, five strings, piano, and horn—participate in this collection of his non-soundtrack writing, with three players, flutist Emmanuel Pahud, violinist Daishin Kashimoto, and violist Joaquín Riquelme García, members of the Berliner Philharmonic.

The album opens exuberantly with the Trio for Flute, Violin and Piano from 1958. A pronounced Stravinskian character is detectable in the violin writing during the opening “Allegro ma non troppo,” which fluctuates between the lively and restful interactions of Pahud's flute and Kashimoto's violin; adding to that intensity is Eric Le Sage's piano, which contributes searing momentum. The lyrical “Andante sostenuto,” on the other hand, offers a comparatively peaceful contrast to the high velocity of the opening movement and the effervescence of the closing “Allegro vivace con spirito.” Arriving later, 1973's Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano is as accomplished as the earlier one and, like it, is a three-movement work that frames an andante with buoyant allegros. As performed by Le Sage, cellist Aurélien Pascal, and clarinetist Paul Meyer, the writing is graceful in the opening “Allegro quasi in 1,” eloquent in the solemn “Andante,” and rousing in the frenetic “Allegrissimo.”

The album's centrepiece is Nonetto, a five-movement, nearly twenty-five-minute work that was commissioned in 1957 but took almost two decades to complete before receiving its first performance at a 1976 Perugia festival. Though that Stravinsky connection again asserts itself in the opening “Allegro,” Nonetto ultimately proves itself to be a Rota creation full-stop when it's writing is so marked by his personality. Scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, and double bass, the piece is also the album's most luscious and expansive in terms of timbre, and the nine musicians approximate the vividness of a chamber orchestra in their superb rendering. As one would expect, the movements vary in tone, with the gentle “Andante” and animated “Canzone con variazioni, allegretto calmo” framing the energized “Allegro con spirito.”

A number of short pieces accompany the trios and Nonetto, among them Valzer sul nome Bach (Two waltzes on the name Bach, 1975), which sees La Sage performing two solo piano pieces, the spirited “No. 1, Circus-Valzer” and jubilant “No. 2, Valzer-Carillon.” Composed in 1943 when Rota was twenty-two and scored for flute, clarinet, oboe, bassoon and horn, Piccola Offerta Musicale (Little Musical Offering) is a mere four minutes but charms immensely when it packs so many ideas into its tight framework and brims with life. Two brief solo piano pieces from The Fifteen Preludes (1964) cap the release, with Le Sage infusing the thirteenth (“Andante cantabile”) and second (“Allegro, ma espressivo e delicato”) with romantic melancholy and elegiac tenderness, respectively.

August 2021