The most comprehensive set ever compiled of instrumental music by Respighi, featuring classic scores such as The Pines of Rome alongside hidden treasures of chamber music. All modern recordings made by native Italian musicians between 2009 and 2015: both an ideal starting and destination point for anyone looking to explore the vibrantly coloured musical world of Respighi.

Italy’s landscape and history supplied Ottorino Respighi with a deep and seemingly inexhaustible well of inspiration and material on which to draw. Works as superficially diverse as the elegantly neoclassical Ancient Airs and Dances, and the opulently orchestrated extravaganza of the Roman trilogy, are united by Respighi’s care for his native heritage, and his curation of it as a living object. He is, in this sense, no less centrally an Italian composer than those of his colleagues dedicated to continuing the opera tradition, from Bellini to Puccini.

Yet there is so much more to Respighi than those two collections. There is the hour-long Sinfonia Drammatica which finds Respighi at his most Straussian. There is the pulsating and neoclassical Toccata for piano and orchestra, the contrasting delicacy of the orchestral triptych after paintings of Botticelli, the withdrawn beauty of his Church Windows sequence, and a sequence of concertante works for violin and orchestra, none of which fit neatly into the ‘romantic concerto’ template. Perhaps the least known and most intriguing work in his orchestral output is his dark and brooding Metamorphoseon, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky in 1930 and thus long predating Richard Strauss’s postwar elegy of (almost) the same name.

The piano and chamber works of Respighi illuminate complementary aspects of his identity, such as his feeling for long-breathed melody and drama in the violin sonatas, and the deft turns of phrase in his student-era piano pieces. When these recordings first appeared, they attracted enthusiastic praise from reviewers, especially the orchestral series masterminded by the conductor Francesco la Vecchia.

‘La Vecchia directs with obvious affection, and the playing has engaging spirit and no mean grace… Desiree Scuccuglia gives a red-blooded and formidably secure account of the solo part [of the Concerto misolidio]’ – Gramophone

‘There is no question that these musicians understand and love Respighi’s idiom. La Vecchia negotiates the music with a definite point of view, carefully balancing the composer’s unique blend of 20th-century orchestral colours and ancient modal chant.’ – Fanfare