Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco
Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco composed almost one hundred works for the guitar and a wide range of chamber and concert music. His writing is often graceful and classically shaped, with a clear singing line and a taste for literary and Italian colour.
The Sonatina for flute and guitar, Op. 205, moves from an Allegretto grazioso through a Tempo di Siciliana to a scherzo-ronde, music that sits easily with French and Spanish chamber fare. Players keep returning to his guitar catalogue for its idiomatic writing and melodic clarity, whether solo, duo or concerto. Piano pieces of Italian character appear beside Liszt and Respighi in programmes that treat Rome and Italy as places of colour and pilgrimage. In the United States he also wrote extensively for the screen, while concert works continued to draw on Shakespeare, the Bible and Jewish liturgy.
Compositions by Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco appear on
Carpe Diem: Piano Music from Italy
This recording celebrates Italy, and Rome above all, as a lasting place of artistic pilgrimage and inspiration. Italian-themed solo piano works frame the premiere of Michael Kieran Harvey’s Carpe Diem (2015).
Fluid Lines
After nearly a decade of hanging out, talking shop and drinking coffee, virtuoso guitarists Daniel McKay and Antony Field formed Duo 19. Their debut presents an eclectic programme of twentieth- and twenty-first-century works, including music by Australians Nigel Westlake and Phillip Houghton.