Appreciation by David Fisher

One of the aims of Leicester Music Society is to enjoy top-quality music in a relaxed environment at the same time as learning about composers and performing musicians, their creative lives and placing the music we hear into historic and social context whilst delving into the meaning of the music. In all these respects, our regular and popular speaker, Robert Calow, took us right to the heart of Respighi’s music and, as always with the Calow brothers, their talks are elevated and enhanced by brilliant visual displays which literally took us to the heart of the music in showing personal photographs of the places which inspired Respighi.

Robert’s discourse emphasised the fact that Respighi is certainly one of the greatest ever orchestrators and every recording he played exemplified this. He used his instruments like a paint palette and mixed orchestral colours with, more often, a much wider selection of instruments than nearly all other composers. The track list below emphasises the wonderful array of Respighi’s music to which Robert treated us. I think we were all quite taken aback that as well as the very famous works mentioned in the title of his talk, we were astonished to hear that he’d written eight operas, five ballets, many transcriptions and found time to be Professor of Composition at the famous Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia for ten years.

In the Fountains of Rome (Fontane di Roma, 1916) each of the movements was introduced with a photograph of the fountain being described. I was particularly taken by the atmospheric Valle Giulia (Daybreak) with stunning woodwind writing, murmuring strings and, later, a lovely cello theme in octaves with an oboe. Each movement was described in detail which was really helpful. But a genuine surprise was to have a break in the middle, when Robert’s son Steve (one of the nation’s finest tuba players) demonstrated in a private recording what is reckoned to be the hardest tuba solo in classical music during the movement describing the Trevi Fountain. It was outstanding! That is the sort of inside knowledge which makes a Calow talk intriguingly personal and special. It occurred to me hearing this pictorial music, what a marvellous film composer Respighi could have been had he not died so relatively young.

Robert also covered Metamorphoseon – Modi XII (Theme and Variations for orchestra, 1930), a masterful transcription of J S Bach’s Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor, first conducted by Toscanini, and several other enticing works as can be discovered below.

The climax of his talk proved to be the Pines of Rome (Pini di Roma 1924) and the extracts from each of the movements – each seemingly more captivating than the previous one. Astonishingly, the orchestration requires 13 woodwind, 18 brass – which include 6 buccinae (ancient Roman military instruments usually played on three different pitched flugel horns), 11 percussion instruments, organ, piano, celesta, harp and a mighty string section, one supposes, to match! The extracts were lovingly described and it was only later on that we discovered that the stunning recording was in fact of Leicester’s and the region’s premier amateur orchestra: The Bardi Symphony Orchestra. That intimacy with and love of the music of Respighi imbued every sentence Robert uttered. We were educated, enthused and entranced all at the same time.