Cello Concerto no.2 (1973), Concerto for strings (1977), Trio for clarinet, cello and piano

The rediscovery in recent years of the enormous catalogue of Nino Rota's music held by the Cini Foundation in Venice is perhaps finally inverting an inversely proportional trend between the composer's popularity as author of film music and as classical music composer. In fact, if on the one hand the happy, thirty-year-long artistic marriage between Federico Fellini and himself inevitably led to identifying the composer with the sound tracks of many twentieth century masterpieces of the "seventh art" (La Strada, La dolce vita, Amarcord, Prova d'orchestra only to name a few of his films with Fellini, but also: Rocco e i suoi fratelli by Luchino Visconti, The Godfather – which earned him an oscar – by Francis Ford Coppola, as well as many others) on the other hand we are beginning to rediscover an artist who fits perfectly (who better than he?) in the area circumscribed by those parameters which delimit "Italian excellence",  a much discussed phenomenon today, if not always intentionally. Refined, gifted with the same ease for composing that Mozart had (at the age of eleven he wrote his first Oratorio), but at the same time aloof and ironic, with a melancholic and paradoxical outlook on mankind, Rota is for both musicologists and impassioned fans – as they gradually uncover some new masterpiece played in concert halls – a constant surprise.  This recording presents his Concerto per violoncello with Enrico Bronzi, one of the greatest and most sensitive musicians of the new generation, playing the solo part and leading the excellent Musici di Parma also in the undisputedly neoclassic Concerto per Archi (presented here in the revised version from 1977). In the Trio con clarinetto of 1973, the magic sound of Alessandro Carbonare blends together with that of Bronzi and Miodini (who play together in the Trio di Parma).

View Also: Alberto Miodini, Alessandro Carbonare, Nino Rota

Iconography: Marzio Tamer, Vecchie Botti, water-colour on paper

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