Respighi Orchestral Works – Simon and Tortelier

Chandos has done its shrewd housekeeping here. Two discs, two conductors, one orchestra, and the whole thing hangs together, which is more than you can say for most twofer repackagings that get shoved out the door at Christmas.

Respighi gets a bad rap in some quarters. Too much varnish, not enough structure, the argument goes, as if orchestration were a character flaw rather than the whole point. He studied with Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg for a few months in 1900 and never really got over it; the lesson took, and took hard. You can hear it everywhere on these two discs, but nowhere more nakedly than in Feste romane, where Tortelier and the Philharmonia go for broke in a way that would have made the fastidious Toscanini wince. Toscanini, remember, gave the premiere in 1929 and reportedly found the piece vulgar even as he conducted it brilliantly. I understand the objection. I don’t share it. This is orchestral Grand Guignol, and Tortelier plays along gleefully — the brass practically leering by the “Circenses” episode, tam-tam crashes that seem to want to crack the studio glass. Loud doesn’t begin to cover it.

Geoffrey Simon’s contributions date from the mid-1980s, early in the CD era, when Chandos was still figuring out how far its engineers could push analog-to-digital transfers without things turning shrill. They needn’t have worried. Vetrate di chiesa — Church Windows — is the real discovery for anyone who thinks they know this repertoire cold. Four movements, each inspired by a stained-glass image (St. Michael routing the rebel angels, poor St. Clare gazing at a distant Christmas Mass), and Simon finds an almost devotional hush in the quiet pages that makes the eruptions land with real menace rather than mere volume.

Metamorphoseon modi XII is the odder, spikier piece, a twelve-variation exercise Respighi wrote in 1930 for the Boston Symphony’s fiftieth anniversary. It’s rarely recorded, probably because it doesn’t flatter itself the way the Roman scores do. No picture-postcard titles here, just a theme worked and reworked with a rigor that surprises people expecting only pomp. Chandos wisely bands each variation separately, so the ear can track what Respighi is actually doing. And what he’s doing, variation to variation, is proving he could out-Reger Reger without losing his fundamentally Italian sweetness of line. The woodwind writing skitters and turns cartwheels; the strings sustain a legato that never curdles into syrup. Harp entries register with real bite, not the mushy wash you get in lesser transfers.

Ormandy set the modern standard for opulent Respighi sound with the Philadelphia Orchestra decades back, gorgeous playing trapped in gorgeous-for-its-day 1964 engineering that simply cannot compete now. Chandos’s early-digital sonics, for all their vintage, still outclass it: more air around the winds, more depth behind the brass choirs, a bass end that doesn’t turn to mud when the organ or bass drum lean in.

Disc two opens with the inevitable Fontane di Roma, and here Tortelier again favors spectacle over subtlety. Not a criticism exactly, more an observation about temperament. Everything is outsized. The Trevi fountain at noon arrives like a special effects reel, full brass, full organ pedal, timpani thundering under it all. Fine by me; this is repertoire built for excess, and understatement would be its own kind of failure. Pini di Roma gets similarly full-throated treatment, though I confess wanting the bubbling horn passages in the Villa Borghese movement pushed a touch more forward in the mix. A small complaint, but Respighi lavished real wit on that writing and it deserves to poke through the texture more than it does here.

Then back to Simon for the rarities, and this is where the set earns its keep for serious collectors. Belkis, regina di Saba gets far too little exposure on disc, probably because extracting a decent suite from the ballet score is trickier than it looks. Simon whips up “Danza guerresca” and “Danza orgiastica” with a swagger that owes something to Copland’s El Salón México — the same intoxicated, faintly dangerous energy, the same sense of an orchestra a little drunk on its own color. Diaghilev would have approved, though the Ballets Russes never got the chance to stage it. Impressioni brasiliane, from Respighi’s 1927 South American tour, is the more refined item, an impressionist canvas rather than a spectacle, and Simon paints it with real sensitivity. The “Butantan” movement, all snake-charmer sinuousness, comes off with genuine atmosphere rather than travelogue kitsch.

Is there a finer single entry point into this composer’s decadent, generous, unapologetically upholstered idiom? I doubt it. Downes and the BBC Philharmonic eventually gave us the complete cycle for Chandos, and that project has its own virtues, greater completeness if nothing else. But for the core of Respighi’s achievement, gathered onto two well-filled, beautifully engineered discs and priced as a single disc, this Simon-Tortelier alliance remains close to unbeatable.