Concerto Gregoriano

Concerto all’antica

for violin and orchestra

Allegro

Adagio non troppo

Scherzo: vivace - tempo di minuetto - vivace

Outstandingly successful among Italian composers in his lifetime but edged further and further out of academic approval with every decade that has passed since his death, Respighi is only just coming back into favour.    As far as concert audiences are concerned, his brilliantly evocative orchestral works inspired by the fountains, pines, and festivals of Rome - most effectively promoted at one time by no less a conductor than Arturo Toscanini - have never lost their popular appeal.    For historians of modern music, on the other hand, Respighi does not represent progress: most of them dispose of him in a few sentences or leave him out altogether.

It is true that Respighi was not the most progressive composer of his day.    But nor does he match the complacent and reactionary late-romantic image created for him by superficial criticism.    If his education at the Liceo Musicale in Bologna (where he studied composition with Luigi Torchi and Giuseppe Martucci) was no more than conventional, he was adventurous enough to take lessons from Rimsky-Korsakov in St Petersburg and ambitious enough to attend the Hochschule in Berlin as well. Though he learned less from Max Bruch’s tutorials than from the rich musical life available in Berlin at that time - when Richard Strauss was musical director at the court opera - the experience certainly did him no harm.

Moreover, while he sought to emulate no one any more progressive than Strauss or Ravel or the early Stravinsky, he was one of the first composers to look back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as a fresh source of inspiration.    The official birthday of neo-classicism is officially reckoned to be May 1920 when Stravinsky’s reworking of pieces by Pergolesi in Pulcinella was first performed by Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet at the Paris Opéra.    But the same company had performed Tommasini’s Scarlatti arrangements in Le donne di buon umore in Rome in 1917 and Respighi’s Rossini transcriptions in La Boutique Fantasque in London in 1919.    In fact, Respighi had made arrangements of violin music by Vitali and Tartini as early as in 1908; it was also in 1908 - nearly ten years before Prokofiev completed his Classical Symphony - that Respighi wrote the Concerto all’antica, although he submitted it for publication only in 1923, when he judged that taste had caught up at last.

“Why should I use new techniques when one still has so much to say through the language of conventional music?” Respighi once asked.    In fact, while he was far from following Schoenberg into atonality, he did adopt one technique which, though not exactly new, was not conventional either.    It was his wife, a singer, who introduced Respighi to Gregorian chant soon after their marriage in 1919.    “It became a craze with him,” Elsa Respighi recalled.    “How wonderful it would be,” he said, “to recast those magnificent melodies in a new language of sounds, free them from the rigidly formal Catholic liturgy of the Roman Gradual and revive the indestructible germ of real human values contained therein.”

The spiritual element of Gregorian chant was obviously important to Respighi but he was also aware of their technical value: church modes could supplement the overloaded diatonic system of the time without overturning it.    There are echoes of Gregorian chant in nearly everything he wrote after 1920 - most consistently in the Prelude sopra melodie gregoriane, the Concerto Gregoriano, the Quartetto dorico, and the Concerto in modo misolidio but also for specific colour effects in works like Pini di Roma and for high-profile dramatic purposes in his operas Maria Egiziaca and La Fiamma .

The Concerto gregoriano - written for Mario Corti and first performed by him in Rome in 1922 - is a fascinating and often beautiful example of what happens when material derived from Gregorian chant is mixed with major and minor harmonies and applied to a conventional form.    Modal melody is not, of course, restricted to the Church: it is a prominent feature of folksong too.    So, although Respighi sets the ecclesiastical scene in quiet string harmonies moving in parallel fourths and fifths in the opening bars, the theme introduced in the Dorian mode by oboe in 12/8 time actually calls the siciliano to mind.    The pastoral atmosphere is confirmed by the first entry of the solo violin with the main theme descending from high on the E-string in the same gentle dotted rhythms and then rising like a lark to an even more elevated position.    The quicker middle section is in the Lydian mode and is based on a theme which, with its repeated notes and restricted range, is more likely to be based on plain chant.    After the reprise of the opening section, again in the Dorian mode but on a different pitch level, a thoughtful violin cadenza integrates the two main themes.

At the beginning of the Andante espressivo e sostenuto (which follows without a break) the strings again move in quiet parallel harmonies and this time the theme associated with them is an unmistakably Gregorian melody, in characteristically verbal rhythms and flexible metre, eloquently presented on the G-string of the solo violin.    This is another ternary construction but more rhapsodic than its predecessor.    It includes a middle section which sets the violin in attractively coloured heterophony against various sections of the orchestra and which then alludes in the bass to the chant-like theme from the corresponding section of the first movement.    The opening theme, which had been introduced in Dorian D, is now recalled in the violin’s highest register in an ethereal Dorian D sharp - a harmonically precarious situation which is eventually resolved in a peaceful D major ending.

The Finale is a kind of rondo based on jubilant Gregorian Alleluja in the Lydian mode introduced by the brass fortissimo and repeated appassionato by the solo violin in legato phrasing on A and then transposed in sturdy double-stops on D.    One of the episodes incorporates a sweetly expressive D minor version of the Alleluja high on the E-string of the violin and another is a dramatically sustained cadenza for the soloist accompanied by rumbling timpani.    The last appearance of the Alleluja in its original form, in Lydian A on the violin, is combined with another allusion to the middle section of the first movement on lower strings and is followed by a coda which finally abandons the Lydian mode for a conclusive A major ending.

It is not particularly remarkable that a composer who was also an accomplished string-player made arrangements of eighteenth-century violin music in 1908.    Ferdinand David and Joseph Joachim are only two of several distinguished composer-violinists of the previous century who took an editorial interest in the baroque and early classical repertoire.    It is very remarkable, on the other hand, that at the same early date Respighi wrote what can only be described as a neo-classical concerto.    The Concerto all’antica does not have as distinctive a personality as, say, Stravinsky’s neo-baroque Violin Concerto of 1931 or Respighi’s own Concerto a cinque of 1933 but nor is it just pastiche:    if it were plain imitation it would be easier to identify the source of Respighi’s source of inspiration.    Basically, he seems to be thinking in terms of the early classical Italian style, but not without wandering geographically northwards and chronologically backwards and forwards.

The first movement contrives to combine features of the concerto grosso with sonata form, contrasting its urgent minor-key main theme with a second subject happy enough to provoke some playful exchanges between violin and woodwind.    As well as the solo episodes which offer the violinist comparatively brief opportunities to display his technical brilliance, there is a full-scale cadenza at the classically conventional point towards the end.

Perhaps the most successful of the three movements is the Adagio non troppo.    A solo line that J.S. Bach might almost have written is accompanied by harmonies and figurations appropriate to more romantic material - but without sounding unduly incongruous and without inhibiting melodic development, which is thoughtfully and most resourcefully sustained.    The last movement wittily declines to choose between the two classical alternatives and interpolates a gracious minuet in the middle of a cheerful scherzo, the last section of which incorporates another cleverly written cadenza towards the end.

Gerald Larner