Rota intro

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 his death forty-six years later    – 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 Santa Cecilia in Rome and which he no doubt passed on to his own pupils at the Conservatoire in Bari.