Dallapiccola: Orchestral Works Vol. 2 - Partita; Quattro Liriche di Antonio Machado; Three Questions with Two Answers; Dialoghi

Dallapiccola was in many respects the quintessential Italian, in love with lyricism, the Romance languages, classical antiquity, Dante, Monteverdi and Verdi. Yet a certain orientation towards Austro-German art led him to follow Busoni, Schoenberg and Webern in seeking new modes of musical architecture. Dallapiccola was to become the first significant Italian composer to embrace Schoenberg’s twelve-note method of composition. But he embraced it from a wholly Italianate direction, deriving his music from twelve-note rows but keeping them subservient to his lyrical and visionary expressive impulses. From the moment of his appointment to the BBC Philharmonic Gianandrea Noseda spoke of his ambition to record the works of this twentieth-century composer. In this volume the Partita receives its premiere recording. Gillian Keith takes the solo role in this, and in Quattro Liriche di Antoni Machado. Paul Watkins performs the solo in Dialoghi and the programme is completed with the 1962 Three Questions with Two Answers, a work thematically related to Dallapiccola’s opera Ulisse.