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Plus Aida Overture première and an unreleased overture by Castelnuovo-Tedesco
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The discovery of a new source copy of Toscanini's 1940 Verdi Requiem will be of great interest to collectors. The tape appears to be a straight dub of 16-inch acetate discs, with no editing between sides which (just) overlap sufficiently to create a seamless recording. Italian collector Luciano Crivello acquired the tapes recently and, in addition to making them available to online Toscanini groups in a straight copy transfer, offered them to Pristine Audio for editing and restoration, commenting: "...of this Requiem several were the issues (Arturo toscanini Society, Music and Arts and many others, I have one also with commentaries and the Deum, but the sound is not so good). The material is really very rare and certainly has never been used even by private labels. This material has never been put in Commerce. It seems to me that the previous releases for sale do not have this sound so good, although some were of excellent quality. But there are some points of this record that sound so natural and strong, as I had never heard before." The sound quality was indeed remarkably good, if at times a little strident and prone to overload distortion during some louder passages. The treble is reasonably extended and it's been possible to remove some background noise as well as to extend and reinforce the bass. Various minor faults and flaws in the recording have been tackled, including occasional pitch instability and small disc surface defects. The other two recordings included here both date from earlier in 1940 and have been preserved in remarkably good sound quality - both are cleaner and have considerably higher treble response than the Requiem. Whilst it is well known that Toscanini premièred Verdi's discarded overture to Aida at the 1940 concert of March 30th, it has been impossible at the time of writing to find out much about the Castelnuovo-Tedesco overture. The composer had been supporting of Toscanini in Italy when the conductor was under scrutiny by Mussolini, and eventually was forced to flee to the United States, where Toscanini sponsored his relocation in 1939. The overture was played twice in concerts given by Toscanini and the NBC Symphony Orchestra (the second performance, on 3rd March 1944, is also available on CD), and in 1945 Toscanini also gave a single performance of the Castelnuovo-Tedesco's overture A Fairy Tale. I have failed to locate any other recording of the present Taming of the Shrew Overture, nor any further information about the work. As such it is impossible to state whether this is the overture's world première, its broadcast première, its US première, or indeed, all three - or of course none of the above. Should this or any other pertinent information become available I will of course update this page. Alas my recording of the work contained too little rapidly-faded applause to include here - suffice to say, therefore, that the audience response was certainly positive, and not the silence implied by the present transfer.
Click here to view additional notes For a full biography of Verdi, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Verdi
Castelnuovo-Tedesco notes from Wikipedia
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (April 3, 1895 – March 16, 1968) was an Italian composer.
Biography Born in Florence, he was descended from a prominent banking family that had lived in the city since the expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was first introduced to the piano by his mother, and he composed his first pieces when he was just nine years old. After completing a degree in piano in 1914, he began studying composition under renowned Italian composer Ildebrando Pizzetti, and receiving a diploma in composition in 1918. He soon came to the attention of composer and pianist Alfredo Casella, who included the young Castelnuovo-Tedesco's work in his repertoire. Casella also ensured that Castelnuovo's works would be included in the repertoires of the Societa Nazionale di Musica (later the Corporazione delle Nuove Musiche), granting him exposure throughout Europe as one of Italy's up-and-coming young composers. Works by him were included in the first festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music, held in Salzburg, Austria, in 1922. In 1926, Castelnuovo-Tedesco premiered his opera, La Mandragora, based on a play by Niccolò Machiavelli. It was the first of his many works inspired by great literature, and which included interpretations of works by Aeschylus, Virgil, John Keats, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, and especially William Shakespeare. Another major source of inspiration for him was his Jewish heritage, most notably the Bible and Jewish liturgy. His Violin Concerto no. 2 (1931), written at the request of Jascha Heifetz, was also an expression of his pride in his Jewish origins, or as he described it, the "splendor of past days," in the face of rising anti-Semitism that was sweeping across much of Europe. At the 1932 festival of the International Society of Contemporary Music, held in Venice, Castelnuovo-Tedesco first met the Spanish guitarist Andrés Segovia. The meeting inspired Castelnuovo-Tedesco to write his Guitar Concerto no. 1, one of the first of almost one hundred compositions for that instrument, which earned him the reputation as one of the foremost composers for the guitar in the twentieth century. The following year the Italian fascist government developed a program toward the arts, which were viewed as a tool for propaganda and promotion of racial ideas. Even before Mussolini officially adopted the Manifesto of Race in 1938, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was banned from the radio and performances of his work were cancelled. The new racial laws, however, convinced him that he should leave Italy. He wrote to Arturo Toscanini, the former musical director of La Scala, who left Italy in 1933, explaining his plight, and Toscanini responded by promising to sponsor him as an immigrant in the United States. Castelnuovo-Tedesco left Italy in 1939, shortly before the outbreak of World War II. Like many artists who fled fascism, Castelnuovo-Tedesco ended up in Hollywood, where, with the help of Jascha Heifetz, he landed a contract with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a film composer. Over the next fifteen years, he worked on scores for some 200 films there and at the other major film studios. Rita Hayworth hired him to write the music for The Loves of Carmen (1948), produced by Hayworth for her Beckworth Productions and released by Columbia Pictures. He was a significant influence on other major film composers, including Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Herman Stein and André Previn. Jerry Goldsmith and John Williams are both his pupils. His relationship to Hollywood was ambiguous: later in life he attempted to deny the influence that it had on his own work, but he also believed that it was an essentially American artform, much as opera was European. In the United States, Castelnuovo-Tedesco also composed new operas and works based on American poetry, Jewish liturgy, and the Bible. His notable students include Louis W. Ballard, Marty Paich, and Ron Purcell. He died in Beverly Hills, California at the age of 72.
Works
Notes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mario_Castelnuovo-Tedesco
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