Credits:

Rota, Nino (1911-1979)

Description:

The Two Faces of Nino Rota: Listening to Film Music and Classical Music] Nino Rota was born into a musical family in Milan, where Puccini, Ravel, and Stravinsky had also visited. After attending the local conservatory, he studied at the Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and after graduation, at the suggestion of Toscanini, he received a scholarship to study composition at the Curtis Institute of Music. He became friends with Aaron Copland and received conducting instruction from Fritz Reiner. Upon his return to the United States, Rota distanced himself from jazz, despite his American studies, and wrote in a neoclassical style without being avant-garde. His works, which he declared "I am not afraid to write melodies that are well received" and "I want to write music that people understand the moment they hear it," seemed in some ways outdated in the post-World War II classical music world, but it was precisely this approach that led to his great success in film music. Still, he said, "A piece of classical music is at least as important as a piece of film music. The album begins with a suite of music from Tolstoy's 1956 film "War and Peace," followed by a concerto for strings commissioned by the I Musici Ensemble (reminiscent of Grieg's Holberg Suite), a harp concerto premiered under the baton of Carlo Maria Giulini, and a "Piano Concerto" for orchestra. The album includes works of "classical music," such as a harp concerto premiered under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini.Finally, the program concludes with music from the film "Orchestra Rehearsal," which is about classical music itself, a clever programming that makes one realize that the two faces of Rota, film music and classical music, come from the same source. The reason for avoiding the best-known film music and choosing the music of "War and Peace," which is rarely recorded, may be to encourage comparison with the music of the opera of the same name completed by Prokofiev in 1952, at about the same time. CAPRICCIO is a typical CAPRICCIO album that focuses on the discovery and revaluation of composers of the first half of the 20th century. Naxos Japan