Camillo Togni

The fifth and final volume of Aldo Orvieto’s complete recording of Camillo Togni’s piano music for Naxos goes back to the start. It gathers the pieces Togni wrote between 1935 and 1938 as a teenager in Gussago, near Brescia, before the turn towards Schoenberg marked by his Serenata No. 1 of 1940. Naxos describes these first works as redolent of Chopin and Liszt. Two cadenzas for Mozart piano concertos, tied to his teacher Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, complete the programme.

Orvieto recorded the disc on 29-31 January 2019 in the Sala delle Capriate of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, which holds the Togni archive. Matteo Costa engineered, and Paolo Petazzi wrote the booklet notes. The earliest pieces are the Impromptu and the Studio in D flat major of 1935, followed in 1936 by a Preludio and the Ballata in F minor. The Pezzo per pianoforte, Op. 4 of 1937 runs to eleven minutes. The Fugato e allegro, Op. 7 and the sixteen-minute Fantasia a quattro voci e pedale, Op. 8, both from 1938, are the works in which Naxos hears his chromatic and contrapuntal writing most vividly. Togni himself later called his piano music of 1936-39 an act of unconditional love for architectural and Baroque grandeur, as Orvieto recalls in his notes to the fourth volume. The cadenzas come from his long bond with Benedetti Michelangeli, with whom he studied from 1945 to 1948. The pianist recorded Togni’s cadenza for the Concerto in C major, K. 503, and planned to play his cadenzas for K. 491 in the autumn of 1993 until illness stopped him.

Naxos CD 8.573986, released in 2020 in the series 19th/20th Century Italian Classics, with booklet notes in English and Italian. All tracks except the K. 503 cadenza are world premiere recordings.