Verdi - Mozart - Respighi

GIUSEPPE VERDI (1813 – 1901) composed his five-act opera The Sicilian Vespers shortly after his great threesome of operas, Rigoletto, Il Trovatore and La Traviata. He had celebrated his fortieth birthday and his successes had finally won him a key place among living Italian composers. Verdi's work had already earned him an international reputation and so Paris showed an interest in his next opera. The composer had a great struggle with the text since it was in French, a language in which declamation differed from that of Verdi's native Italian. Even under these circumstances, however, he managed to turn a story of innumerable intrigues, historical half-truths and purely decorative features into a musically interesting opera which paradoxically works best where it is not too closely bound to the libretto, especially in the highly dramatic overture. The overture is in fact a masterpiece in terms of architectonic structure, with effective contrast and ever increasing tension. The premiere on the 13^th of June 1855 was greeted with enthusians and during the great Paris exhibition it was performed around fifty times.

In the summer of 1778  WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART (1756 – 1791) wrote his Concerto for Flute and Harp in C major, K 299  in a comparatively short time. It is unique in his musical output, but nonetheless Mozart was well aware that he had to compose the kind of music that would suit the taste of the Paris social elite. The former ambassador of the French court to London, the Duc de Guise, had taken a fancy to Mozart and commissioned hif to write a concerto for flute and harp, and the great musician was ready to accommodate his wishes: it is an elegant, good-humoured work with many ingenious melodies in which we find a very unusual development of the sonata movement. 

The Italian composer  OTTORINO RESPIGHI (1879 – 1936) studied music in Rome before completing his education at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and in Berlin under Max Bruch. None of his compositions can compete in popularity with his three highly individually conceived symphonic poems – Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924) and Roman Festivals (1928). Pines of Rome has four movements and the effect of the piece is enhanced by the addition to the orchestra of not only piano, organ and large groups of percussion but of three pairs of bugles in soprano, tenor and bass tuning. .

Respighi wrote Fountains of Rome, the first of the symphonic poems for large orchestra dedicated to Rome, twenty years before Roman Pines, during the 1^st World War, and already sketched out a specific programme for this four-part work to be played without breaks. The introductory part  (The Fountain of Valle Giulia at Dawn) evokes the atmosphere of the rustle of the trees as the birds beging to sing. The second part,  The Triton Fountain, with its striking  entrance of French horns depicts the morning bustle in the streets of the metropolis, while the busy life of the city continues into the section entitled The Trevi Fountain at noon. The final part (The Fountain of the Villa Medici at Sunset ) ushers in a tranquil and melancholy mood.