Search - Anton Nanut, Alfredo Casella, Sergey Rachmaninov :: Respighi, Rachmaninoff, Casella: Toccata for piano & orch.; Paganini Rhapsody; Partita for piano & orch.

At twenty-one minutes Respighi's Toccata for Piano and Orchestra is really more of an extended concert piece, which opens in a chaconnelike frame of mind with some heavy, massive chords and solemn voicings, then segues into a lyrically musing Andante before the somewhat belligerent "toccata" proper takes charge.Though Casella wrote numerous concertos, somehow he never got around to an actual piano concerto, and this "partita"-in which the soloist and his accompanists interface in a more collaborational than oppositional spirit-lives up to the historical and formal associations of the genre in the reach and rigor of its ideas and their elaboration. Not at all the expected neoclassical romp in brittle, tinkling "concertina" style, its three movements (Sinfonia-Passacaglia-Burlesca), with their spiky, driving, polytonal modalism and allusions to Italian folk tunes, show Casella's forceful fluency in its strongest light: in fact, this may be among the best of the composer's many essays in the concertante idiom.