Malipiero, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Cello concertos

Album review

After its first performance in 1935 – by Toscanini and Piatigorsky, no less – Castelnuovo-Tedesco's Cello Concerto more or less fell into obscurity; at least, the composer insisted that Piatigorsky had more or less exclusive rights to it, but the cellist wasn't really one to fight tooth and nail for new works once he had performed them... And so we have had to wait until 2015 for the work to finally be released! Its splendour, its dazzling orchestration and its ample, lyrical phrasing – cutting quite firmly against any dodecaphonism or atonalism – makes for a fascinating discovery, here in the hands of Silvia Chiesa, a champion of Italian 20th century concert music. In the same vein, she continues with the concerto by Gian Francesco Malipiero, which is almost contemporary to the work by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, dating from 1937: here too, the lyricism surges forth on every front, although the final movement seems to have limited interest in the language of Prokofiev or Hindemith. Chiesa closes her album with a concerto by Malipiero – but a different one, Riccardo Malipiero, nephew of Gian Francesco – written in 1957 with a fairly strong twelve-tone flavour, clearly, but its dodecaphonism seemed to fit into a tonal tradition, and, either way, it's formidably lyrical. After all, these three composers are Italian, and Italy vaunts itself as the country of "l’arte lirico"! © SM/Qobuz