The Italian Way

In its early years, just after the war, the Edinburgh Festival tended to take its conductors and orchestras as it found them. It was Sir John Barbirolli and Eugene Goossens who first brought us the Berlin Philharmonic, before Herbert von Karajan got his hands on it. Bruno Walter found himself linked with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra, and Andre Cluytens to the French National Radio Orchestra. 

But, before priorities began to change, the orchestra I really cared about when it came to Edinburgh was the Orchestra Nazionale dell’Accademia di Santa  Cecilia, otherwise known as the Augusteo Orchestra. I was still a schoolboy when it rounded off the 1948 festival with an array of concerts and a display of conudctors that stuck in the mind ever afterwards. It wasn’t, even then, the most famous of orchestras. But with its vast string section crammed on to the Usher Hall  platform and its sumptuously singing tone it was the very voice of Italy.

 Bernardino Molinari ended one programme with Verdi’s sensational but then little-known Sicilian Vespers overture. By the following morning the scarlet-label HMV recording of this, issued to celebrate the occasion,  was a sell out in Jenners, which at the time was Edinburgh’s principal seller of festival tickets. Wilhelm Furtwangler ended another concert with Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The great Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli played Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Gioconda de Vito and Enrico Mainardi, again with Furtwanger conducting.  Vittorio Gui tore into Respighi, and an otgan concerto by Vivaldi, Casella’s Paganiniana, titbits by Tommasini, movements from Pizzetti’s La Pisanella and Purcell’s Fairy Queen, fragments of Ghedini, Martucci and Cherubini, and Veretti’s (not Mendelssohn’s) Italian Symphony  were tossed with a handful of Brahms symphonies into this appetising pot of minestrone which, in the end, fed six whole concerts.

Although, soon afterwards, Rome’s exhilarating orchestra vanished from the festival, it has been back - though not alas in Edinburgh - this month to perform Verdi’s Requiem under its current conductor Antonio Pappano. The old Italian fire, clearly, still burns,  along with a new expertise revealed on a celebratory 100-minute  DVD released in tribute to the event.

So even if you have been unable to hear the players in person, they are passionately on screen with Pappano and other conductors including the affable Yuri Temirkanov and lovely old Georges Pretre who is seen hugging the strains of Ravel’s Bolero in his arms, while tears flow from his eyes. We also - and this is part of the film’s charm -  see the players at home, cooking, tending beehives, growing fruit, making instruments, playing ardent solos up in the Alps and down in forest glades, and being, in general, thoroughly Italian. 

This, you cannot help feeling, is what makes them the players they are. The film, directed by  Angelo Bozzolini and entitled The Italian Character, is well worth its £18 Amazon price-tag.  Buy it, watch it, hear it and you will be enchanted.

27 May 2014