Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s String Quartet No. 2 will be performed live at Plum Street Temple on June 2nd, 2024. Read more about Castelnuovo-Tedesco below.
About the performance:
Soli Music Society and the Ziering-Conlon Initiative for Recovered Voices join forces for a special musical collaboration, presented in partnership with Isaac M. Wise Temple. Violinists Evin Blomberg and Adam Millstein, violist Gabriel Napoli, and cellist Ilya Finkelshteyn will perform a program curated by guest artist Adam Millstein that highlights music by composers whose lives and careers were tragically cut short by the Nazi regime in Europe. This powerful program honors three important composers—Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Erwin Schulhoff and Mieczysław Weinberg—whose works have been revived through recent performances and have now become significant contributions to the world of music.
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895 - 1968)
Unlike Schulhoff, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was not imprisoned but like Weinberg escaped into exile. While Weinberg fled to Russia, Castelnuovo-Tedesco—with help from Arturo Toscanini and Jascha Heifetz—fled fascist Italy to America, eventually landing in Los Angeles where he wrote film scores for the movie industry. He became a teacher, too, mentoring a constellation of future film composers who have collectively turned movie music into high art. But he never strayed from his first love—emotionally expressive classical music. He wrote several pieces for guitar virtuoso Andres Segovia, dozens of affectionate musical “greeting cards” for friends, and more dozens of larger compositions for piano, violin, cello, voice and orchestra, not to mention 7 operas, 4 ballets, and a monumental collection of choral works, many of them based on immortal literature—Shakespeare, Keats, the Book of Proverbs, Walt Whitman, Aeschylus and Virgil. An archive of his manuscripts, a national treasure, now resides in the Library of Congress, donated by his family.
String Quartet No. 2 in F Minor (1948)
When you think of programmatic music, what may come to mind is Beethoven’s Pastorale or Respighi’s Pines of Rome, both of which magically brought actual landscapes to life. This remarkable string quartet very nearly accomplishes the same, describing Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s shock when he returned to his native Florence in 1948 and saw the wrecked city: the Nazis had wantonly destroyed fully one third of medieval Florence, wiping out centuries of the art and history that shaped the birthplace of the Renaissance. In the 1st movement, you can feel Castelnuovo-Tedesco’s eyes sweeping the scene, overcome with sadness and anguish while happier memories surge to the surface, heightening the tragedy of the senseless destruction. This conflict between present and past permeates the first movement, which ends forcefully with a full throated denunciation of the ruin. The peaceful 2nd movement suggests a restorative walk in the countryside, inspired by the cypress trees that have graced Italy since the Romans, symbols of permanence and rebirth in a now injured land. Here, the music becomes rationally wistful, as if trying to reason his native country back to its better days. The walk seems to work. Hope returns. The spirited last movement—rustic, folksy, animated, sometimes jubilant—all but shouts that better days lay ahead.
Notes written by Bill Haxton