Aldo Finzi - Chamber Music

The albums A. FINZI: MUSICHE DA CAMERA and A. FINZI: MUSICHE SINFONICHE are available in the main digital stores. Aldo Finzi (1897-1945), a Milanese composer, in recent years has enjoyed a happy rediscovery all over the world with performances in France, Germany, Holland, Russia, the United States and Mexico. The Donizetti Theatre in Bergamo will close the 2012 Donizetti Festival with his opera La serenata al vento. Born into a Jewish family, he completed his classical studies at the Liceo Parini in Milan and graduated in law at the University of Pavia. Only later did he graduate in composition at the Regia Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome. He soon achieved success among young Italian musicians, composing mainly chamber and symphonic music. During the war period, due to racial persecution, he continued his work in the musical world under other names or anonymously. He died in 1945, asking his dying relatives: 'Have my music performed'. After decades of silence, his scores, thought to be lost, were recovered by his heirs and are now mostly published by the publisher Preludio. It is as part of this rediscovery that Preludio is now publishing, as a label, two CDs dedicated to Aldo Finzi's most important chamber and symphonic compositions. Among the Chamber Music, Pavana and Pastoralina stand out. Composed by Aldo Finzi between 1918 and 1920, the former for piano and the latter for violin and piano, these two elegant pages already reveal the young musician's solid personality; one could speak of an Art Nouveau taste for Pavana, with its subtle echoes of French composers, while the purely Italian character of Pastoralina emerges from the very first bars. The Quartetto per archi (1925-1930) is a rare example, in the panorama of 20th-century Italy, for this formation: the bright instrumental virtuosity is always in function of a strong cantabile, free of thematic developments, open like a Renaissance madrigal. The same can be said for the youthful Sonata for violin and piano, from 1920. A twilight character is often added to this sparkling kaleidoscope in the refined lyrics for piano and voice.