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.
Written in 1924 at the request of the violinist Mario Corti, the Concerto Italiano was Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s first large-scale composition. As the composer explains in his autobiography, Una vita di Musica:
Mario Corti (the intelligent violinist who had been among the first to perform my shorter pieces, and who, among Italians, was the most inclined toward modern music) had asked me to write a concerto for him; and since I was considered at the time an ‘avant-garde composer,’ he expected from me a ‘modern concerto’ (I believe I disappointed him in this respect). Indeed, he sent me as an example the Three Myths by the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski, which had just been published and which seemed to him to be the ‘last word’ in modernity. I studied them carefully, but was not at all convinced… it seemed to me that in those pieces the violin was doing exactly everything it should not do! I believe a much sounder conception was held by our ancient Italian masters (such as Vivaldi), who conceived of the violin as an essentially lyrical and linear instrument.
The composer himself noted that this concerto “has a certain historical importance… in that it was the first violin concerto written in Italy in about a century.” From its first performance at Rome’s Augusteo with Corti as soloist and Bernardino Molinari as conductor in 1926, the piece enjoyed immediate success, leading to a series of performances both in Italy and abroad. These performances included one by the New York Philharmonic – Symphony Society il on 25 January 1931, conducted by Molinari with Jascha Heifetz as soloist.
Unfortunately, in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decade of the current one, the work was seldom performed, nearly disappearing altogether from the repertoire. However, in 2015 the Concerto Italiano received its world premiere recording, in a performance by Tianwa Yang with the SWR Symphony Orchestra of Baden-Baden and Freiburg, conducted by Pieter-Jelle de Boer (Naxos).
Recently, as part of a wide-ranging rediscovery of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s music, this concerto has begun to return to the concert stage. Heartfelt thanks are due to Maestro Nordio for his long-standing dedication to the revival of Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s works.
More information and tickets are available here.