Rustioni Conducts a Postcard from Italy

Malipiero                           Fantasie di Ogni Giorno
Casella                              Concerto Romano for Organ and Orchestra
Respighi                            Fountains of Rome
Pizzetti                               Suite: La Pisanella
 
Daniele Rustioni             Conductor
Martin Riccabona           Organ
 
Daniele Rustioni would like to take some inspirational musical journeys! In this concert, we explore music by the generazione dell'ottanta (‘generation of '80’), a group of Italian composers all born around 1880 and who shifted their attention from the operas of Puccini to instrumental music.
 
Gian Franco Malipiero was inspired by early Italian music and is perhaps best-known for editing Monteverdi’s complete works. When he wrote Fantasie di Ogni Giorno he claimed, extremely improbably, to have created it simply by stringing together musical ideas he had scribbled down from day to day, ‘and it was not even necessary to change their order’.
 
Alfredo Casella and Malipiero together were instrumental in repopularising music of the Italian Baroque era. Casella's ground-breaking and powerful Concerto Romano was inspired by the Wanamaker Grand Court Organ, situated in Macy’s Centre City department store in Philadelphia.
 
Ottorino Respighi’s Fountains of Rome is one of three tributes the composer wrote to the Eternal City. The piece takes the listener from dawn until dusk and from the pastoral Valle Giulia to the utterly urban Trevi Fountain, before finishing gently at the Villa Medici, overlooking St Peter’s.
 
To close, we visit fifteenth century Cyprus through Pizzetti’s incidental music for Gabriele d’Annunzio’s play La Pisanella; the story of a girl from Pisa persecuted by a vengeful Queen who meets an unusual end!