UPDATE: Apparently my fingers weren’t doing things right when I wrote this post, as I came up with two different spellings of “Respighi”. This has been fixed. Weird how some words and names just defy our fingers, for those of us who type quickly in an untrained fashion!
Concluding (or maybe just continuing, I haven’t decided yet) our rather capricious look back at the classical music of one hundred years ago is another work that arrived in 1925. While I had never heard this piece before, I am familiar with the composer: Ottorino Respighi, the Italian composer of such spectacular orchestral showpieces as The Pines of Rome. This work, Rossiniana, is a four-movement orchestral suite that derives from four piano pieces written by Giacomo Rossini. If Rossiniana sounds much less “modern” than we would expect for a work from 1925, that’s the reason: Respighi’s source material dates from the 1850s and 1860s.
That’s a useful reminder, I think: art is often as much about looking back as it is about looking ahead. Respighi updates these salon pieces by Rossini, orchestrating them with his own flair for orchestral writing. The result is something that is somehow old and a little modern. Maybe just a little modern.
Here is Rossiniana by Ottorino Respighi.
