Ancient Airs and Dances

Gagliarda (Suite 1, No.2)

Italiana (Suite 3, No.1)

Aria di corte (Suite 3, No.2)

Villanella (Suite 1, No.3)

Passo mezzo e mascherada (Suite 1, No.4)

Moving forward is not the only way to progress. Stravinsky’s classical-revival works of the 1920s - beginning with Pulcinella based on music by Pergolesi and other eighteenth-century Italian composers - were the hight of modernism in their time. Respighi never advanced beyond early Stavinsky and Richard Strauss: he wrote nothing more progressive in that sense than his three popular and brilliantly evocative orchestral works inspired by the fountains, pines, and festivals of Rome. He was, on the other hand, a pioneer of progression by moving backwards. His ballet La Boutique fantasque based on music by Rossini was performed by the Ballets Russes a year before Pulcinella and long before that he had written a violin concerto, the Concerto all’antica, that anticipates similar developments in Prokofiev’s Classical Symphony by ten years or so.

Respighi’s three suites of Ancient Airs and Dances - written in 1917, 1923 and 1931 respectively - are part of his rediscovery of the music of the past as a way of enriching that of the present. Based on 16th-century Italian lute music (as transcribed and published by Oscar Chilesotti in 1890) and “freely arranged for orchestra,” they reveal a composer of far more sensitivity and modesty than one would suspect if one knew him only by, say Feste Romane. It is true that Respighi uses harmonies his lutenists would not have recognised and that he creates his own constructions, often allying one composer’s material with that of another in the same piece. On the other hand, his orchestration has such a cleverly contrived archaism about it, particularly in the First Suite, that much of the spirit of the original remains.

The Gagliarda by Vincenzo Galilei (father of the astronomer Galileo Galilei) retains its unaffected robustness and, after a pause, it is suitably offset by a gently pastoral middle section kindly contributed by an anonymous contemporary. The Italiana, scored for strings alone like all the pieces in the Third Suite, is a sensitive blend of two graceful dances, one by an unknown composer the other by Santino Garsi. The Arie di corte doesn’t so much blend its material, six elegant court songs by Jean-Baptiste Besard, as present them one after the other with little or no connecting material.

One of the most attractive of all twelve pieces in the collection is the Vilanella taken from an unknown composer’s setting of a sad episode in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, presented here with the plangent vocal line on oboe in its first appearance and, after a slightly quicker middle section, on a solo cello on its return. In cheerful contrast, the Passo mezzo e Mascherada combines several dances from more popular sources to make a brilliant mosaic construction and an effective little finale.

[useful quote? - “Why should I use new techniques when one still has so much to say through the language of conventional music?”]