“The performances here are excellent. Francesco La Vecchia drives the orchestra hard in the symphony, with a big payoff in terms of emotional spontaneity and impact…This boldly engineered disc is the first of four surveying Casella's orchestral music. Recommended, without reservations.” --Classics Today, December 2010
“Casella’s Symphony 1 (1905) shows…striking dramatic effects. II is strongly constructed, and it is music of serious emotional fervor with long, sustained melodies. III builds to the main event with…highly effective sul ponticello string passages. The ensuing main theme is one of his most noble inspirations. After a flamboyant development, the music ends in a quiet elegy over bell-like harmonies.” --American Record Guide, November 2010
“Casella’s Symphony 1 (1905) shows…striking dramatic effects. II is strongly constructed, and it is music of serious emotional fervor with long, sustained melodies. III builds to the main event with…highly effective sul ponticello string passages. The ensuing main theme is one of his most noble inspirations. After a flamboyant development, the music ends in a quiet elegy over bell-like harmonies.” --American Record Guide, November 2010
This first of four recordings of Alfredo Casella’s orchestral music couples his first and last purely orchestral works. Completed the day before his 23rd birthday, the Symphony No. 1, which here receives it world première recording, exudes a self-confidence few composers could match at such an age. Although it abounds in echoes of other music, at its best—above all in the beautiful central slow movement—the Symphony has a truly distinctive identity: Casella’s fondness for dark, even crepuscular sonorities can be heard in the sometimes stunningly imaginative orchestration. After that, the driving motoric rhythms and astringent harmonies and timbres of the Concerto, Op. 69 erupt like the work of a different man entirely.
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