Gorni Krame: The Smile of Swingr: The CD presents a very chatty Kramer, all smiles, and perennially good humoured, ready to talk about his colleagues, also those more famous, including Louis Armstrong. We have Kramer the ‘opinion leader’ (even if the term had not yet been coined) and the singer(Ai tempi che Gallo correva, È vero signor Strauss che il valzer non le piace? ), but above all it is the arranger that towers over all else, the orchestrator capable of going from the popular themes of Di Lazzaro (Reginella campagnola and Rosabella del Molise) through to the pure vital impulse of the two bonus tracks. Gorni Kramer is a man of pure musicality, who had his preferences, starting with Garinei and Giovannini’s repertoire, through to the Cetras, who were perhaps always his ideal interpreters. Also singularly. All one has to do is listen to Felice Chiusano singing Vecchie Mura in 1954 or Paolo Bacilieri singing Op op trotta cavallino, a song Kramer had written for Lucia Mannucci before she became one of the Cetras. An extremely enjoyable record, in which, once again, the ‘Kramer Method’ is highlighted, his skill at writing music so quickly, the way he could compose anywhere, without having to ponder for even a moment, the capability he had of grasping melodies in whatever place he happened to be in and committing them to the pentagram then and there, with a pencil, or a pen, leaning against a wall or travelling on a train. With insuperable mastery.
Nino Rota: I due Timidi - Unlike Ennio Morricone, Rota did not, so to say, live as a lacerating contradiction the relationship between music for films and 'pure' music. Rota's musical ideas, in effect flow without any sense of continuity from the pentagram destined to a film, to one for an opera or concert or symphony. The musical approach, let's say the aesthetics, is the same (save for, obviously, technical requirements). Rota seems absolutely not to suffer the problems raised by a search for a compromise between modern musical research and the at times somewhat basic dominant tastes of the public. In other words, Rota was always himself; he was himself in the music he wrote for a hundred or more films (for Fellini, but also for Visconti, Monicelli, Zeffirelli, Castellani, Soldati, Eduardo De Filippo, and Coppola), as he was in orchestral compositions, in concerts and, more so than ever, in the truly copious quantity of chamber music in which, in effect, he experimented themes that he then used in music for films. To voice Rota dedicated, among other things (over and above the immortal Pappa col Pomodoro), a rich repertoire of sacred music (some hundred pieces) and, obviously, some true gems for musical thealre. Among the many trtles we should at least recall AJadino e la lampa• da maglca (AJaddin and the magic lamp), t963; Ariodante, 1938•1942; 11 cappello di pagtia di Firenze (The 1I0renline straw hat), 1945, 1946. 1955; La none di un nevrastenico (The night of a nef'lous wreck), 1959; Napoli milionana (Millionaire Naples), 1945. As is well-known. he wrote many comic operas, and indeed, according to many critics, the recent revival of the Straw Hat has revealed the only true comic opera of the twentieth century. We must in no way be surprised if a composer who was obstinately tied to the language of tonality was so sue¬cessful in an unknown genre and indeed rejected by the post war avant•garde movements. To renounce to tonality is to renounce to comic opera, the comical element, the grotesque. All themes dealt with, and not by chance, by those twentieth century authors who never tumed their backs on tonality, such as Britten, ?ostakovich, Walton, Menotti, Prokofiev, Weill, Bernstein and, indeed, Rota. In the case of I due Timidl (The Two Timid), written in 1950, the model is quite clearly Puccini's Gianni Schicchi of 1918. That great Tuscan had already under¬stood that the worn•out musical styte of melodrama had to, in order to survive, abandon tragedy (indeed, the petit bourgeois drama of his hapless heroines) and accost itself to comedy and fable (Turandol). In some sense it is as if tonality, its rhetoric, its lexis, had had to, with time, take refuge in ever more humble categories: from Myth to expansive epic fresco, from patriotic romance to bourgeois comedy through to the domestic sketch (as in the two above mentioned works) to end up with popular song and advertising jingles. Genres and worlds that have lived together across epochs but that have emerged alternately in time more evidently as areas of action and public interest. Things change, also love, and the route that takes us from Tristan and Isolde to I Due Timidi demonstrates this with all too exemptary evidence. With this last work we are reduced to the minor neighbourhood episode sketched with that cynicat grace that so recalls Novella's fulminat• ing texts. Portraits at a provincial 'tittle' Italy where in the name of bourgeois respectability one sacrificed happiness and intelligence.