De Sabata: Orchestral Works by Ceccato

Victor de Sabata’s music arrives trailing the scent of paradox. Here was one of the century’s most galvanic conductors—that incandescent 1953 Tosca with Callas remains unsurpassed for sheer dramatic voltage—who abandoned composition almost entirely after his early thirties. The question nags: why?

This Hyperion disc offers three substantial orchestral works from de Sabata’s brief compositional career, and Aldo Ceccato’s advocacy with the London Philharmonic makes a persuasive case that Italian music lost something considerable when de Sabata put down his pen. Not that these pieces will dislodge Strauss or Debussy from the repertoire. But they possess a theatrical immediacy, a frankly sensuous orchestral opulence that makes most contemporary film music sound anemic by comparison.

La notte di Plàton (1923) takes as its subject Plato’s final sybaritic feast before embracing Socratic austerity—philosophy as narrative pretext for a twenty-five-minute orchestral bacchanal. De Sabata deploys forces Strauss would recognize: quadruple winds, eight horns, the works. The orgiastic sections don’t stint—writhing chromatic lines, percussion deployed with almost vulgar enthusiasm, brass that threatens to strip the gilt off the ceiling. Then the contemplative material emerges, and here’s where de Sabata shows genuine craft. That aspiring melody (first in the strings, later transfigured by solo violin) achieves real nobility without toppling into bombast. Almost.

The Straussian influence looms large—Salome and Elektra cast long shadows—but there’s Respighi’s orchestral palette too, and perhaps something of Mahler’s yearning chromaticism. What’s missing is structural inevitability. De Sabata arranges his contrasts skillfully enough, but the piece proceeds by juxtaposition rather than organic development. Still, as sensory experience it delivers. The London Philharmonic’s strings produce a sheen that would make a Hollywood sound engineer weep with envy, and Ceccato manages the dynamic extremes without losing thread.

Gethsemani (1925) takes a different path—contemplative rather than ecstatic, though no less sumptuous in its orchestration. De Sabata bases his thematic material on Gregorian chant, which emerges gradually from the nocturnal textures like moonlight through olive trees. This is programmatic music of a distinctly old-fashioned sort: we get birdsong (woodwinds, naturally), fountains (harps and divided strings), the distant violence of Christ’s arrest (muted brass, timpani rumbles that never quite erupt).

The piece inhabits that peculiar zone between Debussy’s impressionism and Respighi’s more literal pictorialism. De Sabata’s harmonic language remains essentially tonal—conservative for 1925—but his orchestral imagination works overtime. There’s a passage around the nine-minute mark where solo violin and flute intertwine over sustained strings that achieves genuine beauty, a fragrance almost tactile. The climax, when it arrives, unfolds with patient Romantic grandeur. One might wish for more astringency, more spiritual darkness in music ostensibly about Gethsemane’s anguish, but de Sabata seems more interested in contemplative rapture than suffering. Fair enough—though the result feels more suitable for Cecil B. DeMille than Pasolini.

Juventus (1919), the earliest work here, runs barely thirteen minutes but packs in enough melodic material for a piece twice its length. This is de Sabata at his most unabashedly Romantic, and yes, the resemblance to Golden Age Hollywood becomes almost uncanny. That sweeping main theme—all yearning upward sixths and rich string sonority—could underscore any number of Bette Davis vehicles. (One imagines the Warner Brothers music department studying this score with professional interest, had it been available.)

But here’s the thing: de Sabata writes this idiom with absolute conviction, before it became cliché. The contrasts between youthful confidence and aging disillusionment emerge through purely musical means—driving rhythms and bright orchestration giving way to slower tempos, darker colors, fragmenting melodic lines. It’s schematic, perhaps too neat in its binary oppositions, but the sheer melodic fecundity carries the day.

Ceccato’s conducting throughout proves both sympathetic and technically assured. He doesn’t condescend to this music or try to intellectualize it beyond its means. The London Philharmonic responds with playing that balances polish and passion—those string portamentos in Gethsemani could easily sound mawkish but don’t, and the brass maintain focus even at the loudest dynamics. Hyperion’s engineering captures the orchestral bloom without sacrificing detail; you can hear into the texture when needed.

The question remains: why did de Sabata stop composing? Ian Lace’s original liner notes suggest that opera’s dominance in Italy discouraged purely orchestral composition. Perhaps. Or perhaps de Sabata recognized that his gifts—for color, for theatrical gesture, for immediate sensory impact—found fuller expression on the podium than on manuscript paper. These works reveal considerable craft and undeniable sonic imagination, but they lack the structural rigor, the intellectual necessity that marks essential music.

Still, what remains gives enormous pleasure. In an age when so much new music seems determined to punish listeners for their bourgeois expectations, de Sabata’s unashamed Romanticism feels almost transgressive. This isn’t music that will change how you think about the twentieth century. But on its own generous, melodically prodigal terms, it succeeds completely.

Essential? No. But absolutely worth hearing, and Hyperion deserves gratitude for the excavation. One hopes enough material exists for a second volume—though given de Sabata’s sparse output, that seems unlikely. What we have here is a tantalizing glimpse of a road not taken, executed with conviction and recorded with real affection. For those who believe music’s primary obligation is to move listeners rather than impress theorists, this disc delivers handsomely.