Respighi Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 – La Vecchia

Respighi had a magpie’s ear and a curator’s discipline — he could gild anything, and mostly did. This third installment of Francesco La Vecchia’s survey with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma reminds us that behind the Roman trilogy’s gaudy postcards there lurked a composer who spent his mornings, so to speak, hunched over Gregorian antiphonaries and Baroque partbooks. That double life — antiquarian and orchestral showman — animates nearly everything here, sometimes to thrilling effect, sometimes not.

Start with the Concerto gregoriano. Respighi trained as a violinist under Federico Sarti in Bologna and played viola under Toscanini in the Turin opera orchestra — he knew the instrument’s grain, its capacity to sing plainchant without sounding merely quaint. The soloist here, Vadim Brodsky, opens with a long unaccompanied arc that drifts modally, almost weightlessly, into territory that any English listener will hear as cousin to Vaughan Williams’ “The Lark Ascending” — though Respighi got there first, by a few years. Brodsky plays with real temperament. The louder pages have swagger; the soft ones are shaped with tenderness, occasionally over-sweetened, and his intonation wobbles slightly in the opening movement before settling. He is balanced almost indecently close to the microphones — you hear rosin dust, you hear bow changes — but the temperament carries it. Next to Lydia Mordkovich’s more spacious, more aristocratic account, Brodsky and La Vecchia move briskly, shaving the best part of a minute off each of the final two movements. The “Alleluja” finale, frankly, sounds like it wandered in from a 1930s Hollywood biblical epic. That’s not necessarily an insult. Respighi essentially invented that sound.

The Toccata for piano and orchestra is the problem child of the disc. Neoclassicism suited some composers like a well-cut suit; on Respighi it hangs a bit loose. The opening gesture is grandly Bachian — you can practically hear Stokowski’s transcriptions lurking in the harmonic language — but where Stravinsky’s neoclassical scores of the same decade snap with rhythmic wit, Respighi’s Toccata just… unspools. Twenty-five minutes is a long sit for material this thin. Chiara Bertoglio negotiates the piano writing capably, though the writing itself doesn’t sit especially well under the hands — it’s thick, effortful, never quite idiomatic in the way Ravel’s concertante piano writing is idiomatic. She does what can be done.

Far more successful is the Adagio con variazioni for cello, salvaged and reworked from an early, abandoned concerto. This is autumn music, unhurried, tinged with the kind of wistful nostalgia you’d associate — oddly, but truly — with Geoffrey Burgon’s television scores decades later. Andrea Noferini plays with a big, dark, cello-forward tone, especially rich on the lower strings, phrased with an easy, unforced legato that never overreaches for effect. Again the engineers push the soloist close, almost too close, so that string noise and finger pressure become part of the texture — some listeners will find this vivid, others intrusive. I lean toward vivid.

Then there is the Sinfonia drammatica, a genuine curiosity — a symphony in all but name, sprawling toward the hour mark, composed in 1914 when Respighi was still finding his mature voice, before Fountains of Rome made him famous overnight in 1917. It is not a masterpiece. It is, however, a fascinating document: post-Straussian, harmonically restless, occasionally bombastic in a way the later tone poems never allowed themselves to be, since by then Respighi had learned economy. Here he has not yet learned it. The orchestra under La Vecchia plays with evident commitment and stamina — this is not easy repertoire to sustain — brass phrasing full-throated, string tone occasionally thin at climaxes, but the structural pacing across four large sections shows genuine long-range thinking, more than the piece usually gets credit for.

The disc closes with the early Fantasia slava, a student showpiece from 1903, full of borrowed Russian gestures and undigested Rimsky-Korsakov, charming rather than notable. Desirée Scuccuglia handles the piano part with unfussy clarity.

Taken as a whole, this volume confirms what the earlier installments in Naxos’s ongoing Respighi cycle have already suggested: La Vecchia is a scrupulous, sympathetic advocate, even when the music itself doesn’t entirely earn the advocacy. The engineering favors soloists aggressively — sometimes too aggressively — and ensemble polish occasionally slips in the biggest tuttis. But the revelatory value here is real. Nobody buys this disc for a first Respighi purchase; you buy it because you already love the Roman trilogy and want to know what else this restless, learned, uneven composer left behind. On those terms, it delivers — generously, if not always persuasively.