Camillo Togni

Volume four of Aldo Orvieto’s survey of the piano works of Camillo Togni for Naxos concentrates on 1940-44. In those years the young composer worked his way towards twelve-tone writing while holding on to his lyrical and chromatic leanings. Orvieto, who wrote the booklet notes himself, calls the cycle of seven Serenatas an inner diary of Togni’s apprenticeship. Three of them are here, with the Suite, Op. 14a, the Quattro Pezzi, Op. 22 and a short waltz, all in world premiere recordings.

Togni, a favourite pupil of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli and a concert pianist himself until 1953, was then studying composition with Alfredo Casella. Orvieto recorded most of the programme on a Fazioli F278 in the Sala delle Capriate of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice on 30 and 31 August 2016, and the Serenata No. 5 at the Fazioli Concert Hall in Sacile on 18 January 2017, with Matteo Costa engineering. The Suite, Op. 14a (1942) strings together eight short dances, from Bourrée and Pavana to Ciaccona and Valzer. Its pitch field widens step by step, from pentatonic and hexatonic writing through C major and A minor to the last two movements, which Togni regarded as his first truly twelve-tone music. The Serenata No. 2, Op. 11 of 1940, eighteen minutes in four movements, is in Orvieto’s reading a resurrection from the dark withdrawal of the First, mixing impressionistic colour with a reassuring melodic vein. The Serenata No. 4, Op. 15 and Serenata No. 5, Op. 18 move from dissonant openings through fiery virtuoso outbursts to slow movements in austere counterpoint. In the Quattro Pezzi of 1944 Togni went back, partly through Busoni, to some practices of tonal writing. The Valzer (ad usum Lyae), dedicated to the pianist Lya de Barberiis, closes the disc.

Naxos CD 8.573431, released in 2018 in the series 19th/20th Century Italian Classics, with booklet notes in English and Italian.