Two compositions for small orchestra

Pavana and Pastoralina were composed by Aldo Finzi between 1918 and 1920, the former for piano, the latter for violin and piano. These two elegant pages already reveal a solid personality of the young Milanese musician. One could speak of an Art Nouveau taste for Pavana, with its subtle echoes of French composers (Fauré, rather than Debussy and Ravel), although it is not a mere tracing of them, while the bluntly Italian character of Pastoralina emerges from the very first bars. Finzi reveals himself to be a fine and delicate weaver of musical tapestries, but he loves the clarity of the sign, a warm melodic sensitivity, barely veiled by a gentle melancholy; in this he is certainly close to the poetics of the 'Eighties generation', in particular Respighi for Pastoralina. The two compositions were orchestrated by Gian Paolo Sanzogno, one of the leading rediscoverers and connoisseurs of the Milanese composer, in a spirit of fidelity to the language and aesthetics of Aldo Finzi.