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Luminous Respighi from New York

David Hurwitz

Artistic Quality:

Sound Quality:

This recording of the Three Botticelli Pictures has got to be the most texturally detailed, luminous, substantial performance yet captured on disc. Conductor Salvatore Di Vittorio makes sure that every strand of Respighi’s remarkable orchestration stands out in high relief, from the shockingly vivid violin trills at the start of “Spring” to the gently pulsating but constantly shifting motion of the waves in “The Birth of Venus”. It’s an amazing achievement, one that elevates a work all too easily dismissed as a sugary-sweet musical bon-bon. You can’t help but be impressed.

The Birds is equally well played and lovingly shaped by Di Vittorio and his band. Musically speaking the piece employs fewer glitzy effects, and so there are fewer coloristic surprises than we find in the Botticelli Pictures; but this is still a strikingly vivid rendering of this charming suite. Di Vittorio puts special emphasis on the programatic element: the squawking hens, the chirping cuckoo, or the smooth cooing of the nightingale, all effectively superimposed on Respighi’s stylized arrangements of earlier music. As with the Botticelli Pictures, the performance offers a rewarding experience if you really pay attention to what is going on in the music. There’s more than you might have thought. The brief (four-minute) Serenata for chamber orchestra that opens the program makes an absolutely delightful curtain-raiser to the two major works that follow.

Finally, this purports to be the world-premiere recording of the Suite in G major for strings and organ in its original, longer version. Sad to say, this is not major Respighi. Lasting slightly more than 20 minutes and containing four mostly slow movements, the piece is rather dull, even with Kyler Brown doing his best with the organ part. As so often happens when the organ is combined with an ensemble, there are some issues of focus and perspective that the engineers haven’t quite solved, and the strings in this context sound somewhat scrappy at the start–it could be a trick of the acoustic.

Still, the piece certainly is pleasant enough, and for the superb performances of the other two works this disc is well worth hearing. For this reason, I leave the organ suite out of the overall rating.


Recording Details:

Reference Recording: None

  • RESPIGHI, OTTORINO:
    Three Botticelli Pictures; The Birds; Suite in G major for strings and organ; Serenata
  • Record Label: Naxos - 8.573168
  • Medium: CD

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