Roffredo Caetani (1871-1961)
Violin Sonata, Op.6 (1898)
Guido Alberto Fano (1875-1961)
Fantasia Sonata in D minor (1893)
Gran Duo Italiano
rec. 2024, Centro Studi Musicali Rosario Scalero, Poll (Sa), Italy
Brilliant Classics 97378 [59]
Both these little-known composers were almost exact contemporaries. Roffredo Caetani was slightly older, born in 1871 but both he and Guido Alberto Fano died in 1961. Caetani was a godson of Liszt, from a noble background – he was the last duke of Sermoneta and a patron of the arts – and studied piano with Sgambati and then his godfather and was thus in the second or third wave of the renaissance of Italian instrumental music.
His first chamber work was a Piano Quintet and the Violin Sonata soon followed. It’s a large-scale work, 38-minutes long in this performance, composed in 1898 and first performed by the Italian virtuoso Teresina Tua. It has a Classical feel, its first movement’s second subject being lyrical and aerial after which there is some pleasant meandering but there is too little differentiation between it (it’s an Andante) and the succeeding Adagio where there is a similarity of mood and texture. Its most distinctive moment is the lightly-etched contrapuntal writing, at which Caetani seems to have been a proficient practitioner. The finale brings a welcome quotient of charm and lightness before sterner contrapuntalism and rigour, initiated by the piano, takes the work dangerously close to academic working-out. Despite a convincing, strong close, it’s a work that leaves a very mixed impression.
I preferred Fano’s Fantasia Sonata, composed a little earlier, in 1893. The following year Martucci specifically selected him as his student, and then Fano gravitated to Berlin where he met Busoni, become Director of Music at the conservatory in Parma – Toscanini sat on the selection panel – and succeeded to eminence in Palermo and Naples. He survived the War – as he was a Jew, he went into hiding – and died a few months after Caetani. Fano’s Sonata wears its influences more overtly than Caetani’s and they are largely Franckian. He revised the sonata in 1941 formalising it as a four-movement work and it’s both more compact than his contemporary’s sonata and more songful. It’s also simply a better work. The richness of its melodies and their soaring freedom are attractive features of the first movement and Fano distributes his material advantageously in the slow second movement, and adds a crisp and taut Scherzo which, however, doesn’t sound exactly ‘Misterioso’ as marked in this performance. The finale opens with a long piano introduction but despite ensuing vigour, it exemplifies the finale problem, being simultaneously the least characterful and the most conventional of the four movements.
If, in these sonatas, Caetani comes across as a figure from Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard’, Fano is the real thing. It’s just a pity about that finale. The notes are fine and the recording quality sympathetic. The performances of Mauro Tortorelli (violin) and Angela Meluso (piano) are persuasive but the violinist’s vibrato can be rather tight, and other performances might be able to shed different emphases on either or both of these works.
Jonathan Woolf
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