Ildebrando Pizzetti and Michelangeli

A letter (dated 22 June 1942) from Ildebrando Pizzetti [1880-1968] to the publisher Ricordi: 

Vi interesserà sapere, credo, che anche il pianista Benedetti Michelangeli intende studiare ed eseguire i Canti della Stagione Alta. Per lui scriverò due nuove «cadenze».

'You will be interested to know, I believe, that pianist Benedetti Michelangeli also intends to study and perform the Canti della Stagione Alta (1930). I will write two new "cadenzas" for him.'

The concerto was dedicated to Giuseppe De Robertis, with whom he was associated in the circle around the Florence periodical La voce, with the composer and critic Giovanni Bastianelli and the essayist and controversial pamphleteer Giovanni Papini. During the 1940s the great Italian pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli showed some interest in the work—Pizzetti wrote a cadenza especially for him (not included on this recording)—but, in the end, never played the piece.  Written only two years after the Concerto dell’estate (Naxos 8.572013), Canti della stagione alta may likewise be seen in the context of Pizzetti’s ‘naturism’, aptly depicted by the composer’s biographer, Guido M. Gatti, as ‘[conjuring] up a version of life in the open air, among open-hearted people who can interpret and understand nature because they love it and feel it not as something extraneous but as a living and beneficent creative power’. [NAXOS CD notes]

Composed in the Dolomites during the summer of 1930, Ildebrando Pizzetti’s Canti della stagione alta (“Songs of the High Season”) is a large-scale piano concerto in all but name.Sumptuously scored and powerfully evocative of the region, it’s an intensely lyrical outpouring with long-breathed, modally inflected melodic lines which frequently hint at hymnody (the second subject of the central Adagio a case in point), full of pantheistic wonder and imbued with a very real sense of widescreen spectacle (like his countryman and contemporary Respighi, Pizzetti handles the orchestra with aplomb).

(Andrew Achenbach)