November 12, 2010

  • Review: Shakespeare Overtures-Vol. 2 (Castelnuovo-Tedesco)

     

    Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Shakespeare Overtures, Volume Two
    West Australian Symphony Orchestra/Andrew Penny
    Naxos 8.572501
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    Music by Hollywood composers Henry Mancini, Andre Previn, Nelson Riddle, and John Williams all owe a little bit to the ideas of orchestration and composition by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.  The composer had each of them, and many others, as students when he taught at the Los Angeles Conservatory.  Naxos is releasing these premiere recordings of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s eleven overtures drawn from Shakespeare over two discs.  The first volume was reviewed in October.  This release features the remaining five works composed over a twenty-year span.

    The disc begins with a later work, As You Like It, Op. 166. Composed in 1953, it is the last of the overtures to appear.  The music here has moments of magical qualities that float about in a post-impressionist atmosphere with fine woodwind writing led by an English Horn solo.  Dotted rhythms are played against a variety of woodwind flutters as the piece grows to a very romantic sound but with some fascinating parallel movements and intriguing harmonic movement.  As with many of these “overtures”, the piece works more like a tone poem and of all the works, this one dissolves as well.

    The great conductor Arturo Toscanini was the dedicatee to the next work on the disc, The Merchant of Venice, Op. 76 (1933).  A rather unusual melodic line that hints at Middle-Eastern flavors opens the piece which is filled with big brass foreboding.  This is a piece that lands fairly firm in the Romantic orchestral tradition and features enough room for dramatic tempo shifts and movement of the melodic idea around the orchestra.  It is another of the more cinematic-sounding of the overtures.  One is constantly struck by the way Castelnuovo-Tedesco orchestrates  with such clarity throughout.  At fifteen minutes it seems just a tad overlong, but it does take the orchestra well through its paces and the final pages are filled with the sort of ardent romantic writing from the most overwrought of Hollywood films.

    Much Ado About Nothing, Op. 164 (1953), a play also treated by Korngold, was written for Robert Whitney and the Louisville Orchestra.  It is cast in the most romantic of musical clothing and opens with some wonderfully written wind parts that moves to another richly-scored thematic idea for oboe.  The overture is more a series of impressions of various scenes of the play, as are most of these pieces, and like the others contains quotations from specific parts of the play in the score.  Most interesting is a funeral march section with low woodwind colors led by bass clarinet (recalling a similar approach in the composer’s earlier Julius Caesar).  The piece moves on to a finale where various thematic ideas all come together.

    1941’s overture inspired by King John, Op. 111, has a most energetic opening and then moves into a more brass driven section that is more akin to something by Walton.  The musical inference of English concert music is perhaps due to its intended dedicatee, Sir John Barbirolli.  Barbirolli had recently come to take the helm of the New York Philharmonic Symphony and this piece was one of several concert recordings that has surfaced in the past.  It is filled with a sort of warlike dramatic tension that moves forward with hopefulness in its final moments.  It is overall though one of the darker of the eleven overtures and perhaps features the most thrilling of the finales—definitely a work easier to program as an exciting start to a concert program.

    The disc concludes with music for one of Shakespeare’s lesser performed plays, A Winters Tale, Op. 80.  The 1935 piece features a theme that would be reused as the second theme of the slow movement in the composer’s more familiar Guitar Concerto (1939).  The opening of the piece is quite beautiful with woodwinds and harp cast against a cello theme.  Again the music has a truly magical quality enhanced by the harp and bell sounds that color the orchestration.  The opening melody takes some interesting twists and turns as it progresses and the big orchestral moments are simply gorgeous.   

    The pieces here continue to illustrate Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s brilliance as an orchestrator and creator of quite dramatic music influences by specific scenes in his source inspiration.  The sometimes Delius-like impressionist writing with fuller orchestral romanticism has much to recommend it in terms of accessibility.  The themes themselves are not terribly memorable in these works but one is often caught up by the overall engaging sound of the pieces themselves. 

    The performances here by the West Australian Symphony are all well done.  There are some large string moments that feel as if they could be bolstered by more players.  The many wind soloists are exemplary throughout and they are assisted by a detailed and mostly clear recording that allows the atmospheric colors of the music to be warm without being muddy.