Camillo Togni

The third volume of Aldo Orvieto’s complete recording of Camillo Togni’s piano music for Naxos brings together three distinct phases of the composer’s career. The Serenatas Nos. 3, 6 and 7 and the Sonatina, Op. 26 come from 1941-45, when Togni, studying with Alfredo Casella, wrote more diatonically on his teacher’s advice before working back through chromaticism to serialism. Omaggio a Bach and a four-hand reduction of Berg belong to his full adoption of twelve-tone technique around 1949-51, and the Tre fantasie scherzose of 1967 are a light-music aside.

Orvieto recorded the solo works in the Sala degli Arazzi of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice on 24 and 25 June 2015. The pieces with Fausto Bongelli at the second piano were made at the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile on 30 July 2014, with Matteo Costa engineering. The Serenata No. 3, Op. 13, written in October 1941, is dedicated to Lya de Barberiis, a fellow Casella pupil who premiered many of Togni’s works. In the Serenata No. 6, Op. 19a a repeated C octave returns at the start of each section as a provocative signature. The Serenata No. 7, Op. 20 ends its coda, Lento e desolato, on a G minor/major chord. The Sonatina of 1945 revives classical sonata form in rich, Scriabin-like textures. Omaggio a Bach, Op. 32 for two pianos, begun in the 1950 Bach bicentenary, derives its series from the BACH subject of the unfinished last fugue of The Art of Fugue. Its third movement is dedicated to the memory of Togni’s father, Schoenberg and André Gide, who died within months of one another. Allegretto gioviale is Togni’s 1949 four-hand reduction of the first movement of Berg’s Lyric Suite. The three Fantasie scherzose paraphrase popular songs, among them Chaplin’s Smile and La musica è finita, with nods to Liszt, Scriabin and Rachmaninov, as Daniela Cima’s booklet note explains.

Naxos CD 8.573430, released in 2016 in the series 19th/20th Century Italian Classics, with booklet notes in English and Italian. Everything except Omaggio a Bach is marked as a world premiere recording.