Penny, West Australian Symphony - Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Shakespeare Overtures Vol 1 (2010)

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Penny, West Australian Symphony - Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Shakespeare Overtures Vol 1 (2010)

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The art of Shakespeare was a recurring fascination for Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. In addition to two operas and numerous settings of songs and sonnets, he wrote 11 Shakespeare Overtures which here receive their first ever complete recording. Deploying all the resources of the symphony orchestra, these are some of the twentieth century’s most dramatic and tuneful orchestral works, spectacular evocations of Shakespeare’s greatest plays.

Composer: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Conductor: Andrew Penny
Orchestra/Ensemble: West Australian Symphony Orchestra

Reviews: Who knew that Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote overtures to 11 of Shakespeare’s plays? Not I and apparently not many others either, as every one of the works on this disc is claimed to be a world premiere recording. Naxos labels it Volume 1, so a companion CD containing the remaining five overtures— The Merchant of Venice, Much Ado about Nothing, As You Like It, The Winter’s Tale , and King John —is expected.

If you know Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895–1968) by anything other than his famous D-Major Guitar Concerto, possibly his Violin Concerto titled “The Prophets,” and perhaps a few of his Jewish-themed choral works included in the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music project distributed on Naxos, you’re doing better than I am. Here is a composer with a catalog of more than 200 works—and that’s just the ones with opus numbers—who has simply never achieved recognition commensurate with the volume and quality of his output.

His “sin,” no more and no less than that of his close Italian contemporaries—Casella, Pizzetti, Malipiero, and Respighi—was to be born at a time and place where composing music in a late-Romantic and Impressionist style was regarded as regressive and reactionary by the modernists elsewhere on the Continent. Of this group, only Respighi seems to have enjoyed more or less permanent staying power. But Castelnuovo-Tedesco (hereinafter referred to as C-T for short) struggled against a second bias. Under Mussolini, Italy’s Jews may not have suffered the same fate as did their German, Austrian, and Polish co-religionists under Hitler, but fascist Italy was still not the friendliest place for a Jewish composer.

So in 1938, C-T left for the U.S., where he soon found work, as did so many other composers who fled Europe in those years, in the film industry. MGM Studios embraced him with open arms, and over the next several years he contributed to the scores of more than 200 films, all the while continuing to compose concert music. He became one of the most sought-after composition teachers in Los Angeles, taking on as students André Previn, Henry Mancini, and John Williams.

The first impression to strike one about these Shakespeare overtures is their made-for-the-movies character. This is not intended to be uncomplimentary; rather, it’s an observation of the vividly colored orchestration and the sweeping cinematic panoramas the music seems to encompass. Of the 11 overtures, six of them were written after C-T had arrived in the U.S. and taken up with the Hollywood crowd. Three of these— A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1940), Antony and Cleopatra (1947), and The Tragedy of Coriolanus (1947)—are on this volume. The earliest numbers—i.e., the five written while C-T was still in Italy—were The Taming of the Shrew (1930), followed by Twelfth Night (1933), The Merchant of Venice (1933), Julius Caesar (1934), and The Winter’s Tale (1935).

All of the overtures were conceived as stand-alone concert works, not as curtain-raisers to operas or incidental music to staged productions of the plays, and not as film music to accompany the rolling of the opening credits. As such, C-T’s overtures avoid storytelling; they do not attempt in a few minutes’ time to telescope the action of the plots. Instead, they take their cue from one or more specific events in the plays and develop a strictly musical narrative around them. This downplays programmatic associations and lends each overture a sense of structural integrity as a complete entity unto itself, worked out entirely in formal musical terms.

Over time, the overtures grew, not necessarily in length—though the 1947 Antony and Cleopatra expanded to nearly 18 minutes—but in ambition of orchestration. Where the 1930 Taming of the Shrew employs strings, double woodwinds, four horns, two trumpets, timpani, harp, piano, and percussion—hardly a modest-sized orchestra—the later overtures triple the winds and add English horn, contrabassoon, tuba, a second harp, tubular bells, glockenspiel, castanets, and a battery of various drums. Moreover, augmented string sections now find their parts frequently divided, and section leaders are highlighted in many striking solo passages. “The more grandiloquent moments,” observe Andrew Penny and Graham Wade in their booklet note, “anticipate the epic sweep of Miklós Rózsa’s film scores for Ben Hur or Quo Vadis of the 1950s.”

While certain parallels may exist, it should be emphasized that C-T’s overtures are serious symphonic works. They are not the stuff of movie soundtracks or, in arrangements, of summer-evening pops concerts. They are, however, not truly of their time—a statement that could apply to Respighi as well—in that they are big, bold, brightly painted musical billboards in a post-Romantic/Impressionist style that feature many of the same exoticisms and techniques one hears in scores like Respighi’s Roman Trilogy.

I take Naxos at its word that these are world premiere recordings; therefore, it is taken as an article of faith that other versions for comparison purposes do not exist. No matter, for the performances here by Andrew Penny and his West Australian Symphony Orchestra sound aces to me, and the recording has plenty of headroom for maximum impact in the music’s most massively scored passages. I can’t imagine why anyone would not be taken with these highly attractive scores. Definitely recommended.