Italian Piano Concertos

[Florestan]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen!

Please help me. I had a debate with someone who denied absolutely any value to the Italian concert pianism. I retorted with the obvious examples of Busoni and Malipiero, but apart from them and some minor works of Dallapiccola and Scelsi I had no other option. Since I won't let him win the day, my question is: are there any other good (or at least pleasant) Italian piano Concertos? Any input will be much appreciated.

[Harry Collier]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen!

are there any other good (or at least pleasant) Italian piano Concertos?

The succinct answer is: no. "Piano concertos" and Italian composers do not go together.

[Maciek]

Great thread, Florestan! I'm hoping to learn something here!

[Gurn Blanston]

Good day, ladies and gentlemen!

Please help me. I had a debate with someone who denied absolutely any value to the Italian concert pianism. I retorted with the obvious examples of Busoni and Malipiero, but apart from them and some minor works of Dallapiccola and Scelsi I had no other option. Since I won't let him win the day, my question is: are there any other good (or at least pleasant) Italian piano Concertos? Any input will be much appreciated.

May I ask if there is a time period restriction here?

[springrite]

With its heavy emphasis on operas, Italian composers for the most part ignored anything non-operatic since the end of the Baroque period. There was hardly any important Italian composers of note of non-operatic music until well into the 20th century -- Respighi and Malipiero to name but two. So in that sense Italian composers were well behind. Busoni is an interesting case. He is an Italian composer by nationality but neither he nor the Italians considered him very Italian.

The only Italian piano concerti I have that I can remember off the top of my head are by Martucci, Respighi and Busoni, of which only the Busoni reaches close to masterpiece level.

[m_gigena]

Does Menotti count as an italian?

If so, we have his piano concerto, recorded by Earl Wild.

[not edward]

The post-war modernists era seems to be the most prolific for Italian piano-and-orchestra pieces, but even then most of them aren't called "piano concerto."

Berio (...points on the curve to find..., Echoing Curves, Double Piano Concerto).
Sciarrino's also written some good piano/orchestra pieces.
Maderna did a good concerto for two pianos and orchestra.
Nono's como una ola de fuerza y luz is great, but I think calling it a piano concerto would be a stretch.

[Florestan]

Thank you all. And no, there's no time restriction for this thread.

[m_gigena]

Found this with Google

http://www.amazon.com/Piano-Concerto-Scherzo-Small-Orchestra/dp/B00007E8RD

[pjme]

There is more -but the quality varies :

Respighi : two concerti : Concerto in la minore per pianoforte e orchestra (1902)
Concerto in modo misolidio per pianoforte e orchestra (1924) 
, a Toccata for piano & orch. (1928)

Ildebrando Pizetti, Canti della stagione alta (1930) ( something like a "Summer"concerto for piano & orch.)

Bruno Bettinelli, at least two concerti ( Bernstein has recorded a symphony by Bettinelli)

etc ... and as in almost every other country, many composers are just forgotten. (Just like the French...) The Italians do little to promote other composers than Verdi, Puccini and a handful of contemporary artists.

[Don]

There's also the Sgambati piano concerto composed around 1880.

[m_gigena]

Respighi : two concerti : Concerto in la minore per pianoforte e orchestra (1902)
Concerto in modo misolidio per pianoforte e orchestra (1924) 
, a Toccata for piano & orch. (1928)

From Respighi also, but not strictly piano concertos: Concerto a cinque and Fantasia Slava.

[Florestan]

Thanks all for your input. I'll try to listen to your suggestions. As for my debate, it's useless: the guy is a fanatical Germanophile.

[oyasumi]

Giovanni Paisiello

[Earthlight]

Giovanni Paisiello

He's a good one . So's Muzio Clementi.

[Robert]

Nicolas Flagello

[pjme]

This the website - a databank- of contemporary composers.
http://amic.dsd.it/Index.htm
Notice 31849 


If you type in "concerto per pianoforte e orchestra" you'll find at least 30 works by ,well, unknown italian composers (written roughly ca 1965-2006). Marco Stroppa, Franco Mannino, Luca Francesconi, Nicolo Castiglione are names not totaly unknown to me. ( I have some Castiglione on disc).
The concerto (1953) by Bettinelli I mentioned is quite interesting -in a fairly lyrical Bartok/Prokofiev manner - but the recording is rather poor . Paul Kletzki is the conductor

Concerto n° 1 per pianoforte e orchestra
Bruno Bettinelli
Ornella Puliti Santoliquido, pianoforte ; Orchestra del Teatro alla Scala ; Paul Klecki, dir.

Alfredo Casella is another composer who had his moment of fame ca 1930-1950.
He composed at least two concertante works fro piano & orch.
A Partita for piano & orch ( 1924-1925) and a concerto for piano, stringorch. and percussion (1943)



This is as far as I know, the only version on CD of Casella's Partita.

Paul Snook in Fanfare wrote:

At twenty-one minutes Respighi's Toccata for Piano and Orchestra is really more of an extended concert piece, which opens in a chaconnelike frame of mind with some heavy, massive chords and solemn voicings, then segues into a lyrically musing Andante before the somewhat belligerent "toccata" proper takes charge. Although there once existed two rarely encountered LP recordings, this version supersedes both on all grounds, particularly because of the theatrically emphatic flair of its presentation.

Pierce and Nanut reinforce the neo-Baroque sympathies of this program with a first recording of Alfredo Casella's "Partita for Piano and Orchestra." Though Casella wrote numerous concertos, somehow he never got around to an actual piano concerto, and this "partita"-in which the soloist and his accompanists interface in a more collaborational than oppositional spirit-lives up to the historical and formal associations of the genre in the reach and rigor of its ideas and their elaboration. Not at all the expected neoclassical romp in brittle, tinkling "concertina" style, its three movements (Sinfonia-Passacaglia-Burlesca), with their spiky, driving, polytonal modalism and allusions to Italian folk tunes, show Casella's forceful fluency in its strongest light: in fact, this may be among the best of the composer's many essays in the concertante idiom.

A comparably dry, detached, and deliberative approach is applied most fruitfully to that old late- Romantic virtuoso warhorse-the Rachmaninov Paganini Rhapsody (hence the "Italian Connection"), thus illuminating a whole new facet of the Russian composer by transforming the "rhapsody" into an example of the kind of variational neoclassicism which Eric Salzman pinpoints so well in his excellent annotation, and therefore enabling the Rachmaninov to fit right into this program of works all written within the same ten-year span (1924-34). All three performance on this Phoenix release are extraordinarily well meshed: Pierce and Nanut work together like a team of well-trained thoroughbreds, and the Yugoslavian engineers supply a matchingly sharp, vibrant close-up acoustics. Highly recommended.

[Florestan]

Thanks, pjme! I see myself confirmed that, after all, there are Italian piano concertos worth hearing!

[Maciek]

Marco Stroppa, Franco Mannino, Luca Francesconi, Nicolo Castiglione

Actually, I heard something by Stroppa for the first time a few days ago! It was very interesting stuff (difficult to judge a composer by one piece though). I know Francesconi too - and like him (I think he's been to Poland a couple of times...?). I'm not sure about the other two though. I seem to remember Nicolo Castiglione but I may be confusing him with the Castiglione (Baldassare) who wrote the book Il Cortegiano (16th century).

[pjme]

Niccolò Castiglioni (Milano, 17 luglio 1932 - ivi, 7 settembre 1996) fu un compositore e pianista italiano.

Italian Wikipedia has someinformation on Castiglione. No English ( or Polish) I'm afraid.

I have a "psalm " on disc ( written ca 1960-1970) in typical avantgarde style : extreme tessitura for the soloists ( 2 soprani - some notes are "cruel"!) I'll check it out and report later...

It's clear that we know very little of Italy's contemporary composers....Strange - italian design travels well... ...