Castiglioni: La buranella, Altisonanza & Salmo XIX

Chronique

Gianandrea Noseda is one of 2015's hot conductors, at least in Britain and continental Europe. Here he records some music that is little known outside his native Italy, and it's likely that outsiders will be happy to know about it and to learn more. Composer Niccolò Castiglioni came of age during the postwar, serialist reign of terror in Europe, but he was influenced by John Cage and then by the American minimalists. His music came out sounding like neither of those, instead exploring Baroque models in unusually deep ways. The three works here are entirely different in flavor, but each shows the use of techniques from the 18th century. The opening La Buranella, from 1990, is an orchestration and adaptation of movements from harpsichord sonatas by Baldassare Galuppi, all little bits of solo orchestral color. The mood is reminiscent of Lukas Foss' witty neo-Baroque pieces. Entirely different is the weighty choral Salmo XIX (Psalm 19), which is in an atonal idiom, but reflects the textures Haydn used to set a similar text ("The heavens are telling the glory of God..."). Altisonanza (1990­-1992), with a piano in the ensemble, has sparse textures and rhythms that evoke, rather than imitate, the sarabande and other Baroque dances. All three pieces are entirely absorbing, and if you're looking for the successor to Respighi and Malipiero, Castiglioni may well be he. Noseda gets the necessary precision work out of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra and Danish National Concert Choir, and Chandos hits it out of the park with their engineering work in the Danish Radio Koncerthuset in Copenhagen.
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