Italian Perspectives, out today on Pentatone, is the album I recorded with the Bamberger Symphoniker at the Joseph-Keilberth-Saal in Bamberg between June 2022 and May 2023. The programme includes Martucci’s Symphony No. 1, Rachmaninoff–Respighi’s 5 Études-Tableaux, and Respighi’s Trittico Botticelliano. On Italian Perspectives, we explore a repertoire that for decades has remained at the margins of concert life, as I note in the booklet itself:

Martucci and Respighi have, for many years in Italy, paid the price of being pigeonholed in a creative style that was judged to be too academic, of being considered ‘different’ in the birthplace of opera and, in Respighi’s case, of remaining ensnared in biographical and political matters (his association with fascism) which have hampered full understanding of his work. It is disheartening for an Italian conductor to see how the rising fortunes of these composers, partly thanks to some of Martucci’s captivating work, are today finding fertile ground mainly outside Italy. Listening today to Martucci’s compositions reinstates the voice of late-nineteenth-century Italy, a country still inebriated by opera but capable of looking with interest and courage towards the new, bold changes taking place in European symphonic music. By contrast, listening to Respighi means recognising the unique qualities of the last great poet of music, a contemporary of the avant-garde movement who was nonetheless capable of looking to the past with a love that is uplifting, all the while expressing a profoundly twentieth-century style; a true successor, capable with his transcriptions of transforming music from the past with devotion and an ultra-modern flavour. As a result, it is need rather than fortuitous choice that today brings me to conduct Martucci and Respighi. Martucci’s Symphony No. 1 is modern in mood and rigorous in structure. What fascinates me in Respighi’s orchestration of Rachmaninoff’s 5 Études-tableaux is its dual register, academic and experimental, culminating in the remarkable power of the orchestra’s apotheosis. The Trittico Botticelliano remains a masterpiece of Respighi’s symphonic work, merging orchestral colour and poetic expression in unparalleled perfection.