When harpists from around the world gathered in Toronto last week for One Harp World, a pair of presentations explored the contributions of two Italians to the twentieth century harp repertoire: the harpist Clelia Gatti-Aldrovandi and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
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Two of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s concertos, a musical form especially dear to the composer, will be heard this week at music festivals in Italy. At the Festival della Valle d’Itria, Francesca Dego will perform the composer’s Second Violin Concerto with the Orchestra dell’Accademia Teatro alla Scala. The following day, the Pordenone Music Festival will feature Lucio Matarazzo and Giovanni Masi as soloists in the Concerto for Two Guitars as part of a program inspired by Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s correspondence with fellow composer Franco Margola.
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A recently rediscovered recording of a 1958 concert in Los Angeles gives us a rare opportunity to hear the composer perform his own music: Three Hebrew Chorales (1926) for solo piano, selections from Coplas (1915) in which he accompanies the renowned soprano Marni Nixon, and his First Piano Quintet (1932) together with acclaimed Los Angeles chamber musicians. The occasion was an evening honoring Castelnuovo-Tedesco hosted by “The Composer’s Workshop,” a series created by Dr. Anneliese Landau, a musicologist who was also an emigré to the United States.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote two piano quintets: one in 1932, at the height of his Italian career; the other twenty years later, as “A Florentine in Beverly Hills,” looking back with nostalgia. The composer performed both of these quintets at their respective premieres and on other occasions; they were clearly works to which he was deeply attached. Following the publication of the previously unavailable Second Piano Quintet (“Memories of the Tuscan Countryside”) by Edizioni Curci, a new recording by Alessandro Marangoni and the Quartetto Adorno (Naxos) invites us to reconsider this pair of works.
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In 1949, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed Three Sephardic Songs, his only setting of Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) texts. Long out of print, these songs have just been re-issued in a new critical edition based on the composer’s manuscripts. For the first time, the work will be available as both the original version for medium voice and piano (or harp) and Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s orchestration for voice and chamber orchestra, prepared under the auspices of the Institut Européen des Musiques Juives (European Institute of Jewish Music). Edited by the musicologist and conductor Nir Cohen-Shalit, the new edition corrects errors in the original 1959 publication by Israeli Music Publishing (IMP) and brings to light a richly conceived orchestral version that had remained unpublished until now.
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The 800th anniversary of the death of Saint Francis will culminate in 2026, with celebrations taking place in Italy and among Christian communities worldwide. A wide-ranging cultural program will be dedicated to the Saint of Assisi and his spiritual legacy. Musicians wishing to mark this anniversary in their concerts have begun to rediscover the Tre fioretti di Santo Francesco [The Little Flowers of Saint Francis] Op. 11, for voice and piano, composed by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco in 1919.
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For his debut CD, pianist Adriano Murgia turns to works from Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Florentine years. His selections illuminate the composer’s distinctive musical voice and the sources of inspiration that nourished it in that period: nature (Alghe, I stagioni); beloved works of art (I naviganti, inspired by Andrea Pisano’s bas-reliefs) and places close to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s heart — his family’s home in the hills above Florence (Calma a Giramonte); the Tuscan seaside resort of Castiglioncello (Terrazze); and the lively city of Naples, where he spent his honeymoon (Piedigrotta 1924). The recording concludes with the Fantasia e Fuga sul nome di Ildebrando Pizzetti, an expansive and virtuosic work, recently republished and heard here in its world premiere recording.
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On Friday, March 27, 2026, the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, based in Parma, Italy, will perform The Prophets, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Second Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, for the first time in its repertoire. The soloist will be Mihaela Costea, concertmaster of the orchestra, who is celebrating twenty-five years with the Filarmonica Toscanini. Several of the composer’s grandchildren will also be in attendance. Andrej Boreyko will conduct the program entitled “Sacro e Profano” [Sacred and Profane], which brings together the biblical inspiration of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Second Concerto and the dramatic intensity of Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony. The evening will open with De Rerum Natura by Leonardo Marino, a new commission of the Ecosounds project.
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A new recording conceived in Tuscany in October 2025, on the occasion of the 130th anniversary of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s birth, is now available on digital platforms. Produced as part of the festival Musica Perseguitata: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and Italian Music in the New World, organized by the Centro di Formazione e Cultura Musicale di Vinci, the project was selected as a recipient of a 2024 “Per Chi Crea” grant, supported by the Italian Society of Authors and Publishers (SIAE) and the Italian Ministry of Culture (MIC). The initiative brings together outstanding young local musicians who are already active on the international stage.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Concerto Italiano in G minor for violin and orchestra, Op. 31, will be performed in Lisbon, Portugal on 1 February 2026, as the centerpiece of a concert devoted to twentieth-century Italian music. Domenico Nordio will appear as soloist with the Orquestra Sinfónica Portuguesa, conducted by Maestro Antonio Pirolli in an evening that will take place at the Centro Cultural de Belém and will also include works by Malipiero and Respighi.
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After celebrating the publication of all eleven Shakespearean overtures by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, we are delighted to share another piece of good news. Four Dances for Love’s Labour’s Lost, another Shakespeare-inspired orchestral work, is presented for the first time in a new edition from Edizioni Curci.
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Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s musical identity has always resisted easy categorization. He explicitly rejected affiliation with “modernism, neo-classicism, or any other -isms,” choosing instead to pursue a deeply individual path.* His style reflects a rich constellation of influences: the Great Masters, the teachings of his mentor Ildebrando Pizzetti and other members of the Generazione dell’Ottanta, early 20th-century French music (especially Debussy and Ravel), his Spanish roots, Jewish culture, and various folk traditions. While Ravel is often mentioned as one of many influences, a recently published article in the Italian journal [divulgazioneaudiotestuale], argues that the connection was much deeper. The guitarist and musicologist Marco Surace demonstrates that Ravel was a significant source of inspiration for Castelnuovo-Tedesco throughout his career, from his formative years in Florence to his exile in America. Surace proposes a perspective that enriches—and in some cases reshapes—our understanding of Mario’s distinctive musical language. As 2025—the 150th anniversary of Ravel’s birth—comes to a close, we invited Marco to tell us more about these ideas in the following interview.
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In 1962, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed his Concerto for Two Guitars and Orchestra, op. 201 at the request of the celebrated Duo Presti Lagoya (Ida Presti and Alexandre Lagoya). The world premiere took place on December 4 of that year in Toronto, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra conducted by Walter Susskind, with Presti and Lagoya as soloists. A newly released CD from the Canadian label Doremi Music allows us to hear a live recording of the Concerto, broadcast by the French radio service France Musique—a recording that was, in all likelihood, made on the very night of the premiere.
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In the summer of 1960, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco conceived Platero y yo as a melologue for narrator and solo guitar. After reading Juan Ramón Jiménez’s prose poems*, which recount the story of the deep bond between a poet and his donkey Platero, Castelnuovo-Tedesco selected twenty-eight vignettes to accompany with music. Although the composer wrote the music to accompany narration of the poems, he agreed that the music could also work on its own. While performers have presented the complete cycle with the spoken word in many languages, there is also a longstanding tradition—beginning with Andrés Segovia—of performing Platero y yo without narration, allowing the guitar itself to tell the story. The latest embodiment of this approach is a double album released by OUR Recordings, featuring Danish guitarist Niklas Johansen.
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Shakespeare’s works provided a lifelong creative thread for Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. His devotion to the Bard first revealed itself in the 1920s with The Passionate Pilgrim: 33 Shakespeare Songs, Op. 24, for voice and piano, and continued for decades in many forms. Between 1930 and 1953, the composer wrote eleven orchestral overtures inspired by Shakespeare’s plays — a notable contribution to the twentieth-century orchestral repertoire. Today, thanks to the recent publication by Casa Ricordi of four previously unavailable overtures, the complete cycle of the eleven Shakespeare Overtures is now available for rental via Zinfonia.
On September 11, 2025, at the Steinway & Sons Flagship Store in Milan, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 130th birthday was celebrated along with the tenth anniversary of the Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Collection, published by Edizioni Curci in collaboration with CIDIM – Comitato Nazionale Italiano Musica. Quartetto Adorno [Edoardo Zosi, Liù Silvia Pellicciari, Benedetta Bucci, and Maria Salvatori] and the pianist Alessandro Marangoni delighted the audience by performing two works featured on their recordings for Naxos: the first, devoted to Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s quartets, has already received wide critical acclaim; the second, featuring his quintets, will be released in early 2026—and is eagerly awaited.
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Art songs play a prominent role in Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s musical output. Approximately a quarter of his works with opus numbers are devoted to this genre, and many of these pieces were composed early in his career, during his years in Italy. However, he did not turn his attention to American poetry until 1936, when he set verses by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) in I Saw in Louisiana, Leaves of Grass, and Ocean. A just-published volume from Edizioni Curci unites the composer’s twelve Whitman songs for the first time.
When guitarist Nicolò Spera and ethnomusicologist and conductor Giovanni Cestino conceived an ambitious project to expand the repertoire for choir and guitar, one of their first steps was a deep-dive into Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Romancero Gitano Op. 152. Written in 1951 and considered the first modern work for this genre, the composer’s seven-movement cycle set to Federico Garcia Lorca’s poems is one of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s most often performed works. Stefano Colombo and Lorenzo Giustozzi of ITER Research Ensemble, in collaboration with Giovanni (who is the artistic director of the Ensemble) and Nicolò, delved into the work’s source materials and found a wealth of interesting information that deeply impacted their interpretation of the piece. This journey led to the creation of a new, soon-to-be-published edition, and is the foundation of the project’s first CD, released in 2024 by the Dynamic label, Margutti & Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Works for Choir and Guitar, available on digital platforms. Stefano, Lorenzo, Giovanni and Nicolò kindly agreed to tell us in detail about this fascinating initiative.
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The Divan of Moses-ibn-Ezra, performed by German guitarist Anne Haasch and French mezzo soprano Natalie Perez, is the heart of the new CD Songs of Wandering (Genuin Classics). Humbled by her experiences of meeting survivors of Nazi-Fascist persecution, Anne connects at a human level as well as at a musical one with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s guitar works, and in particular with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s setting of verses by the exiled medieval Jewish poet Moses ibn Ezra. Anne kindly agreed to tell us about how this project came to be, her collaboration with Natalie Perez, and what this music means to her.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music left a lasting impression at the 13th USA International Harp Competition, held from 14-24 May 2025 at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, Indiana. On Saturday May 24, three exceptional young harpists performed Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s recently republished Concertino for Harp and Chamber Orchestra, the required piece in the final round of the competition. That same evening, while the judges were deliberating, Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco shared memories about her grandfather onstage at the Jacob School’s Musical Arts Center. The day before the finals, Diana gave an in-depth lecture about the composer’s musical legacy, including the Concertino, to harpists and educators gathered for the events.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s lifelong love of literature is the unifying theme of the new CD Stories, Sonnets, and Serenades (Dynamic). Pianist Simonetta Heger and soprano Elizabeth Hertzberg present premiere recordings of a diverse selection of art songs set to texts by European poets including Heinrich Heine, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The CD also features a cycle for solo piano, The Stories of Joseph, dedicated in memoriam to the great writer Thomas Mann, whom Castelnuovo-Tedesco knew as a fellow exile in California. Simonetta and Elizabeth kindly agreed to tell us about their experience recording these works that are, as yet, little known to the public.
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The Day of the Fox is a film score that Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed in 1956 for a television cartoon based on the famous Japanese folktale. In April 2025, this music was performed live for the first time at the Conservatorio Franco Vittadini in Pavia, Italy.
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On Sunday, April 27, 2025, the Chicago Sinai Congregation hosted an exceptional concert dedicated to the vocal music of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Klaus Georg, the Synagogue’s High Holy Days Music Director and Lecturer in Music at Loyola University Chicago, conceived a wide-ranging program of rarely performed works.
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In the 1950s and 1960s, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco explored the expressive possibilities of combining the human voice with the sounds of the guitar in works including Romancero Gitano, Ballata dall’esilio, Vogelweide, and The Divan of Moses-Ibn-Ezra. A newly published volume adds two more pieces to this body of work: La Ermita de San Simon and Romance del Conde Arnaldos.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and his music was part of an evening that celebrated 200 Years of Italian Opera in the United States, which took place at the Fondazione Corriere della Sera in Milan on 29 January 2025. The presentation of “A Bridge of Music” began with a conversation led by Ferruccio de Bortoli, president of the Fondazione Corriere della Sera, which preceded a concert of music by Rossini, Paganini and Castelnuovo-Tedesco.
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Guitarist Pietro Locatto dedicated his latest recording, Songs of Exile [Stradivarius], to the music of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. The theme of exile, fundamental to understanding Castelnuovo-Tedesco as a human being and an artist, allows Locatto to combine two iconic, but very different, works for guitar: the Concerto in D Major for guitar and orchestra, written for Andrés Segovia in 1939 as the composer was about to leave Italy to emigrate to the United States, and the Divan of Moses Ibn Ezra, an intimate setting of poems by the medieval Spanish-Jewish poet, composed for voice and guitar in 1967. The Concerto was recorded with the Orchestra Sinfonica d’Este, conducted by Nadir Garofalo, and the Divan was a collaboration with the soprano Ronja Weyhenmeyer. Pietro kindly agreed to answer our questions and tell us about his journey with this music.
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After a decades-long absence, in January 2025 Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music is once again on the program of the New York Philharmonic. The Italian conductor Daniele Rustioni, in his debut performances with the Phil, will open a series of three concerts with Mario’s Merchant of Venice Overture followed by Dvořák’s Violin Concerto with soloist Joshua Bell and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. All four of the composer’s grandchildren and his two great-granddaughters plan to attend the performance on Saturday, 11 January, which has been sold out for weeks.
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In December 1939, the outbreak of war in Europe and the continuing economic hardship of the Great Depression did not put Americans in the mood to celebrate. But in his “Greetings, Friends” column in The New Yorker (23 December 1939), the humorist Frank Sullivan managed to find some people he was happy to toast to, including Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, who had arrived in the United States barely five months before.
As Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s career as a composer and performer flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, he also became known as a music critic. Leafing through his writings from the period*, one can observe that he often cites the opinion of “l’amico Perrachio” [my friend Perrachio], as if everyone would know the name. Unfortunately, today very few have heard of the composer and teacher Luigi Perrachio (1883-1966). David Korevaar, distinguished professor of music at The University of Colorado Boulder, discovered Perrachio’s work more than 20 years ago and thinks audiences should discover it, too. Most recently, he and the Carpe Diem String Quartet released the world premiere recording of Perrachio’s Quintet for two Violins, Viola, Cello and Piano (1919), which they paired with Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Quintetto in Fa (1930). David kindly agreed to answer our questions and tell us about his journey with Perrachio’s oeuvre.
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In 1967, Mario began what would become his final composition: Appunti, Preludes and Studies for Guitar, op. 210. Undertaken at the request of the guitarist and teacher Ruggero Chiesa for the Milanese publisher Suvini-Zerboni, the work was conceived as a series of pieces for the musical and technical education of young guitarists. The composer worked enthusiastically on the project, but he did not complete the Appunti before his death on 16 March 1968. At that point, only the first book of the four envisioned had been published. For the rest of what Mario had composed, Chiesa published fingerings only for the pieces that did not require major revisions to be performable, since he had not had the chance to discuss other changes with Mario before his passing. Thus Chiesa left it to individual guitarists to decide how to adjust the remaining pieces to be completely performable. Edoardo Pieri is one of the few who have taken up the challenge of performing these works. His double CD of the Appunti, was released this year on the Da Vinci Classics label. How did Edoardo stay faithful to the composer’s intentions, while also making these pieces work technically on the guitar? He kindly agreed to tell us about his experience with this lesser-known work, why it inspires him, and why he believes the Appunti deserve more attention.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s piano music will be performed in New York City during Piano Italiano, a celebration of rarely heard Italian piano music that begins this weekend. Twelve concerts will be held from Friday, 25 October through Sunday 3 November 2024 at two intimate venues: BargeMusic in Dumbo and KlavierHaus in Manhattan. The series is co-produced by Italy’s Rovigo State Conservatory, as part of the Rovigo Piano Festival project, with the coordination of Roberto Prosseda and Federico Nicoletta, both internationally acclaimed pianists and professors at the Conservatory. Prosseda and Nicoletta will perform in the Festival, along with twelve young Italian pianists.
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A new edition of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Concertino for Harp and Chamber Orchestra op.93a (1938) has just been published by Schirmer Music. There is also a new edition of the harp part, edited by Elizabeth Hainen, principal harpist of the Philadelphia Orchestra and faculty at the Curtis Institute of Music. The newly available editions are based on the composer’s original manuscripts, which are held in the Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Papers at the Music Division of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. The first performance of the new edition took place in Genoa, Italy on 25 September 2024. The Orchestra of the Opera Carlo Felice performed the work under the direction of Davide Massiglia with harpist Ieuan Jones as soloist. A live recording of the concert is available here.
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“I’m a guy who loves challenges” is how the guitarist Cristiano Poli Cappelli describes himself. When you take a look at the kind of projects he creates, this characterization is fitting indeed. In 2014, he and Andrea Pace recorded Les Guitares Bien Tempérées [The Well-Tempered Guitars], Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s cycle of 24 preludes and fugues for two guitars. Recently he returned to Mario for another ambitious project, this time for solo guitar: a new Double CD (Davinci Classics) that features two works from 1961: the complete cycle of Los Caprichos de Goya and Tre Preludi al Circeo. Cristiano kindly agreed to answer our questions about his experience immersing himself in these masterworks from the composer’s final years.
The Quintet for Guitar and Strings, op. 143 is one of the best known and most often performed works in Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s catalog. Until recently, few were aware that the composer had also penned three string quartets. This summer, Naxos issued a recording by Quartetto Adorno that features all three of the quartets, the first two of which in world premiere recordings. The scores for the three quartets are now available in critical editions edited by Angelo Gilardino for The Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Collection, which is published by Edizioni Curci in collaboration with CIDIM-Comitato Nazionale Italiano Musica. The recording, which is available on all digital platforms, was produced with support from CIDIM, the Accademia Musicale Chigiana and the Comune di Quattro Castella.
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Italy was the theme of this year’s edition of the Paganini Guitar Festival, which took place in Parma, Italy from 23 – 27 May 2024. So it was not surprising that the director of the festival, Giampaolo Bandini, gave Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music an important role. At the opening concert, no less than four works for guitar and orchestra were performed by exceptional soloists and the Orchestra “I Musici di Parma”. The composer’s granddaughters, Costanza and Diana, were among the audience in attendance. The following day, Marco Surace of the Italian music magazine Quinte Parallele interviewed Diana about her grandfather’s relationship with Italy.
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14 September 2021 was the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, author of one of the greatest works of medieval poetry, the Divine Comedy. Celebrations were muted due to the global pandemic, but musicians – particularly in Italy – were inspired to explore musical settings of Dante’s immortal verses. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s contributions : I quattro sonetti da ‘La vita nova’ (1926), Sera (1921), and A Dante Sonnet (1939) were included in several projects that emerged from these studies. We recently had the honor of talking to the artists who conceived one such initiative. Mezzosoprano Manuela Custer and pianist Raffaele Cortesi kindly agreed to answer our questions about their CD for the Tactus label, Liriche su testi di Dante [Art Songs based on Dante’s Texts], which includes Mario’s Quattro sonetti.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s chamber music and human journey were recently highlighted in Houston at a program presented by the Congregation Emanu El and The Shepherd School of Music at Rice University, with support from the Evelyn Rubenstein Jewish Community Center. A concert and lecture entitled Sounds of the Sephardic Diaspora on Sunday, 25 February 2024 featured a group of outstanding young musicians who performed chamber music by twentieth-century Jewish composers. The afternoon also included remarks by Diana Castelnuovo-Tedesco about her grandfather Mario and other composers who expressed their Jewish and Sephardic heritage in their music. The event was part of a series of programs dedicated to Jewish music that Congregation Emanu El Cantor Rollin Simmons launched in 2022 in collaboration with the Shepherd School.
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Cellist Silvia Chiesa, a passionate interpreter of twentieth century Italian music, will perform Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Concerto in G Minor for violoncello and orchestra, op. 72, in Palermo, Sicily on 1 and 2 March 2024 with the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, conducted by Maestro Massimiliano Caldi. These evenings will be the first performances of the Concerto in Italy in nearly ninety years. The dedicatee, the legendary virtuoso Gregor Piatigorsky, performed it in Florence and in Rome in 1935, after which it disappeared from the stage. The piece, which Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote only a few years before he emigrated to the United States, is the composer’s only work for cello and orchestra. Silvia knows this Concerto well: first, she recorded it as part of her project Twentieth Century Italian Trilogy, which includes for the first time together on three CDs, recordings of cello concerti by Italian composers Nino Rota, Alfredo Casella, Ottorino Respighi, Ildebrando Pizzetti, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Riccardo Malipiero, and Gian Francesco Malipiero for Sony Classical. More recently, she also has performed the Castelnuovo-Tedesco Concerto in concerts in other European countries. Silvia kindly agreed to talk with us about her infectious enthusiasm for Italian music of the twentieth century and about her experiences with Mario’s concerto.
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In 1960, after a student gave him a copy of Juan Ramon Jimenez’ prose poem masterpiece Platero y yo [Platero and I], Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco chose 28 of the work’s 138 chapters and set them as a melologue for guitar and narrator. Platero tells the story of a poet and his faithful donkey in the Spanish village of Moguer in Andalusia, and this touching work has become one of the composer’s most beloved. Mario set his Platero y yo to both the English translation by Elise Roach as well as to the original Spanish text. As Jimenez’s poems have now been translated into more than 100 languages and dialects, Mario’s musical setting has been adapted and performed in dozens of countries. The composer believed that the cycle was also effective as a solo guitar work, without narration, and it is also often performed this way. Recently several artists have been in touch with us about their Platero projects, which we are happy to share in this article.
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One of the most memorable sessions of last summer’s Italian- Jewish Studies Conference in Camaldoli, Italy was a lecture and concert by the Duo Vanini-Coni (mezzosoprano Valentina Vanini and pianist Giuseppina Coni), during which they focused on the art songs Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote during his early years in Florence. The Duo has recently released a two CD box set (Tactus), which features both these early art songs as well as works for solo piano of the same period, along with interesting and in depth liner notes by Professor Cesare Orselli. The project includes the premiere recordings of three songs: La sera fiesolana, based on Gabriele D’Annunzio’s celebrated poem; La canzone della vita, with words by Mario’s elder brother Ugo Castelnuovo-Tedesco; and the brief cycle Il libro di Dolcina, set to poems by Laura Milani Comparetti, the mother of Elisa Milani, a childhood friend of Mario’s. Valentina and Giuseppina kindly agreed to tell us about their experience studying and recording this music.
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I Grandi Dimenticati: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco [The Forgotten Greats: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco] began on 22 October 2023 at the Conservatory G.Pierluigi da Palestrina in Cagliari, Sardinia and will continue through 10 May 2024. The project, the largest commemoration of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music to date, includes 22 conferences and concerts that involve 22 professors and more than 100 students of the Conservatory, in addition to another 15 students from other parts of Europe. Two of the composer’s grandchildren, Diana and Greg, traveled to Cagliari to participate in the first week of events.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music was seen and heard at the 2023 edition of Cremona Musica, a three-day trade fair that combines business, music and culture. Held in Cremona, Italy, a city rich in musical history and especially renowned as a center of musical instrument manufacture, the fair is a meeting place for musicians, music teachers, publishers, instrument dealers, students, collectors and enthusiasts from Italy and around the world. In this article we share a few highlights.
Italian guitarist Andrea De Vitis has been lauded internationally for his concert performances and recordings, and he is also a renowned teacher. Until recently he was at the Conservatory in Avellino, Italy and starting this fall, he will be Professor of Guitar at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. He has recently added to his discography with recordings for the Naxos label of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 21 Greeting Cards for Guitar as well as the composer’s rarely-heard Passacaglia “Omaggio a Roncalli”. Andrea kindly agreed to tell us about this latest project, which has already received several excellent reviews.
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The Second Italian Jewish Studies conference, which was dedicated this year to “The Jews and Music in Modern and Contemporary Italy” was held from 3-7 July 2023 in Camaldoli, an enchanting location to consider the music and artistic journey of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco and other composers of Italian-Jewish descent, such as Renzo Massarani, Vittorio Rieti, Leone Sinigaglia and Aldo Finzi. The gathering, comprised of talks and concerts, involved an international group of leading scholars and exceptional musicians.
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In the late 1940s, after working for some years as a film composer in Hollywood, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco found his way back to chamber music, a genre he had always loved. Mario was inspired to write his celebrated Quintet for Guitar and Strings, op. 143, as well as other works that remained unpublished for many years. Thanks to the collaboration between Edizioni Curci and the composer’s family, many of these works are now published and available in the Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Collection. The Ensemble Mark Rothko, based in Northern Italy, has dedicated its latest recording project to Mario’s music from this period. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Chamber Works (Da Vinci Classics) includes the world premiere recording of the Third String Quartet “Casa al Dono,” op.203 (1964). The composer’s final quartet, a work filled with nostalgia for Tuscany, is dedicated to the composer’s friend Bernard Berenson (1865–1959), the great scholar of Italian renaissance art. Benjamin Bernstein, Ensemble Mark Rothko’s violist, kindly accepted our invitation to tell us about this project and the group’s experience recording Mario’s music for the first time.
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For his latest recording project, award-winning Italian guitarist Antonio Rugolo explores all of the works that Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco wrote for solo guitar during his Italian years. Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: The Complete Italian Solo Guitar Music (Brilliant Classics) was born from Antonio’s desire to return to the Florentine composer’s scores, starting not from the classic editions revised by Andrés Segovia and published by Ricordi and Schott, but from the more recent manuscript-based editions published by Bèrben and Ricordi under the supervision of Angelo Gilardino and Luigi Biscaldi. In the liner notes, the guitarist explains that his intention was to highlight all the ideas Castelnuovo-Tedesco put forth in his guitar scores, with particular attention to the Sonata (Omaggio a Boccherini), the Capriccio Diabolico, and the Tarantella. Antonio kindly agreed to tell us more about his experiences studying and recording this music.
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In his later years, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco often returned to the Bible as a source of inspiration. In 1953 he wrote Songs of the Shulamite, a work for voice, flute, harp and string quartet, set to verses from the Song of Songs. Performed for the first time in Los Angeles in 1963 under the auspices of the University of Judaism, the work remained unpublished and unperformed for decades. Samuel Magill, former Associate Principal Cello, The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, and today Principal Cello, Western Piedmont Symphony, wanted to explore and champion this unknown work. Sam and his collaborators in the North Carolina-based ensemble Sono Auros – flutist Lucian Rinando and harpist Grace Ludtke – along with guest artists soprano Jodi Burns, violinists Janet Orenstein and Stephanie Ezerman, and violist Maureen Michels will perform this cycle on 17 May 2023 as part of a concert program at Temple Emanuel of Greensboro, North Carolina. The event will surely be the work’s first performance in the twenty-first century! Sam tells us more about the project in the following interview.
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In celebration of Mario’s birthday on 3 April , we are delighted to share a recently rediscovered Italian television segment featuring the composer, conducted at his home in Beverly Hills. Mario and his son Pietro Castelnuovo-Tedesco, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, were interviewed by the prominent Italian journalist Tito Stagno for the RAI documentary “Italiani in California”.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco considered Evangélion “the high point” of his piano compositions. Written in 1949, Evangélion: The Story of Jesus, Narrated to the Children in 28 Little Pieces for Piano, was often misunderstood during the composer’s life. It was rarely performed and essentially forgotten for decades. In 2014 the Italian pianist Alessandro Marangoni made the world premiere complete recording of this cycle for Naxos. In collaboration with the Italian actress Claudia Koll as the narrator, he has performed Evangélion all over Italy and abroad in a multi-sensorial production conceived by director Stefano Sgarella. On the occasion of an upcoming performance in Palermo on 3 April, 2023 (Mario’s birthday!), Alessandro kindly agreed to tell us about the show they have created and about his experience bringing this intense work to the public.
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Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s 36-year collaboration with the legendary guitarist Andrés Segovia resulted in 35 works featuring the guitar. The correspondence between these two artists provides an unprecedented source of information for performers and scholars. Beginning in 2014, for his PhD thesis at the University of Surrey, the guitarist Benjamin Bruant began a six-year journey that led him to eventually gather and translate into English (from the original French) Segovia’s letters to MCT as well as the extant letters by Castelnuovo-Tedesco, held in the Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco Papers at the Library of Congress. Published in 2021, his doctoral thesis, From Commission to Publication: a Study of Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s Guitar Repertoire Informed by his Correspondence with Andrés Segovia, presents his annotated translations of decades of correspondence along with commentary on each of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s compositions discussed in the letters. Benjamin kindly agreed to tell us more about his project in this recent interview.
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