Concerto soirée for piano and orchestra (1961)

Valzer-Fantasia: Tempo di valzer tranquillo

Ballo figurato: Allegrettoo calmo, con spirito

Romanza: Andante malinconico

Quadriglia: Allegro con spirito

Can-can: Animatissimo

Nino Rota was best known in his lifetime as a composer of film music – and he probably always will be, or at least as long as classics like Fellini’s La Strada, La dolce vita and 8 ½, Viscnti’s The Leopard and Coppola’s The Godfather remain in circulation. But, prolific though he was in the film studios – he wrote more than 150 film scores between 1933 and 1979 – he by no means neglected the concert hall or the opera house. There are dozens of piano pieces, all kinds of chamber and orchestral music, numerous choral works and no fewer than five ballets and eleven operas.

When writing music, Rota observed. ‘I feel happy’, adding that he’d do everything he could ‘to give everyone a moment of happiness.’ That, he said, ‘is what is at the heart of my music.’    So, far from presenting imponderable profundities, his concert music tends to be as tuneful and as entertaining as his film music. For the same reason, and at some cost to his reputation with the critics of the day, he resisted the more radical developments in harmony adopted by many of his contemporaries. He preferred to remain true to the tonal tradition which he had inherited through his academic training at the Milan Conservatoire and the Conservatorio di S Cecilia in Rome and which he no doubt passed on to his own pupils at the Conservatoire in Bari.

The Concerto soirée, which was written in 1961 not long after the music for La dolce vita, is a work in a category of its own. It best described perhaps as a piano concerto written in the spirit of Rossini’s Soirées musicales in which the soloist is required not to perform heroics in the romantic grand manner but to amuse him/herself and the orchestra with a variety of sociable ideas. The first movement is a waltz in C minor based on the melody introduced by the piano in the opening bars. Adorned by Chopinesque figuration and gently mocked by grumpy comments in the bass, that theme is briefly developed, gives way to a tumultuous middle section and is succeeded by a new waltz tune before, with a relaxation of the tempo, it is recalled in C minor. The piano opens the Ballo figurato (Ballroom Dance) in a lighthearted C major and retains its good humour even when threatened by an aggressive rattle of repeated notes from woodwind and brass.

At the heart of the work, both structurally and emotionally, is the Romnaza in A minor, the main theme of which is the exotically inflected melody intimated by the piano after expressive preliminary remarks from solo cello and viola.    A quicker, capricious episode, including a loud intervention from the orchestra at the very centre, is followed by a recall of the main theme on cor anglais combined with memories of the middle section on the piano. The soloist chooses to end the movement in A major.

Returning too dance mode, the Quadriglia (Quadrille) begins with a woodwind arpeggio which recurs again and again, in its original form or inverted, to hold together a movement that is as unpredictable in content as it is lively in rhythm. Least    predictable of all perhaps is a comedy incident on the strings, then on woodwind and piano, which sounds like a passage of caricature from one of Rota’s film scores. The gallop at the beginning of the brilliantly scored and ever quicker Can-can was in fact to be used again in 8 ½ two years later.