Legend tells that Ulysses was the first mariner and man able to escape the temptations of the Bay of Naples. He had heard of the bay’s infamous sirens – part women, part bird – that lured sailors to their death by singing so beautifully that no one could sail on without succumbing.
Close to the bay Ulysses plugged the ears of his crew with beeswax and bound himself to the mast until they had sailed safely out of range of the sirens’ audible temptation. Angry over their failure to seduce their prey, one of the sirens, Parthenope, drowned herself in the sea.
The original settlement on the bay was said to have grown on the spot where she washed ashore, claiming her name as its own (the area is now part of the city of Naples, Italy).
From that very moment, the city of Naples started his path in history and no one was able to escape anymore from his charming, least of all French composers.
Seduced by its beauty, its songs and its flavour, back in their country and far away from this fusion of heaven and hell, from high and low cultures that mix together uniquely, composers like Alkan, Poulenc, Godard and Debussy kept remembrance of this Ville Joyeuse deep in their earth, a city bestowed by God upon music and musicians.
Useless, in this cd, seek for that theoretical transaction of Italian-French music that since the first Parallèle des Italiens et des Français en ce que regarde la musique et les opéras (1702) by François Raguenet (1660–1722), a scholarly French priest, that caused a lively controversy because of its author’s manifest preference for Italian music. As we are over the Querelle des Bouffons, the essence of Daniele Adornetto’s project are composers between XIX and XX century and the way they perceive Neapolitan music into their production.
Close to the famous Claude Debussy, we found different perspectives of Parthenopean music. The first piece encountered was written by Charles Marie Valentin Alkan, a renowned virtuoso famous for an extremely complex technic. He chooses a standard approach in his Variations sur une Barcarolle napolitaine, [01] composed merely for showing his own pianist abilities as well as did H. Rosellen in his Santa Lucia (from the famous song with the same name).
Completely different and almost in contrast is the idea of Claude Debussy. Written in Dieppe in September 1904, L’Isle Joyeuse [10] could be considered as one of the greatest masterpieces of early twentieth-century pianism and a rare example of Debussy’s concert piece.
A shiny work, able to enter immediately and overwhelmingly in the collective imagination, where the euphoric happiness arising from the new love for Emma Bardac, married after leaving his first wife, becomes palpable.
The inspiration would come from a painting by Watteau named L’embarquement pour Cythère, so not from Neapolitan songs, which would explain the reason for the ancient spelling of “island” with isle, instead of ile.
As Les Collines d’Anacapri, Preludes No. 5 from Book 1, a quasi-tarantella where are still nature and environment to be the main protagonists. Alfredo Casella asked Debussy why he titled the piece with reference to hills, while on the small island of Capri there are slopes but not hilly landscapes. Debussy would have replied that knowing the wine of Anacapri, he had thought that wine is produced where there are hills.
The three-movement of Napoli – Suite pour le piano by Francis Poulenc is a typical French character piece. Written during a visit to Italy and finished in Nazelles in September 1925, it is conceived as a large-scale virtuoso piano music. The suite opens with a Barcarolle, a flowing cantilena.
The Nocturne which follows is similarly lyrical. The third movement, Caprice italien, suggest the bustle of Naples. All the three pieces are effective, exuberant, and extremely difficult under a technic profile, nevertheless, Poulenc never breaks his inner poetic where bright melodies, brisk rhythms and a lucid style always lead the pieces.
Deeply connected with Poulenc is even the Tarantelle by Henri Tomasi [8], composer and conductor of Corsican descent, a pupil of Gaubert at the Paris Conservatoire and winner of the Prix de Rome in 1927.
He was one of the founders, alongside Prokofiev, Poulenc, Milhaud and Honegger, of the contemporary music group ‘Triton’. His vision of a Tarantelle is maybe the most iconoclastic, his use of rhythms of the original Dance as well as the main melody is a mere excuse to exposing a deconstructing idea of the piece.
More classical and traditional to the standard idea of the piece du salon are composers like
Chaminade, Pierné and Herz (the older of the cd).
They oppose to avant-guarde and impressionism ideas the main songs of the city. Its rhythms come back to the center of their music. If Gabriel Pierné in his Tarantelle [15] use several themes, well recognisable from the traditional repertoire, just for showing a good entertainment, Chaminade has a fascinating and almost dramatic idea of Neapolitan music.
Chanson Napolitaine is nearly a song of nostalgy full of recall from a journey in the past by that time, and that could never happen again. A wonderful idealisation of a city able to enchant his visitors putting in their souls indelible memories of joy and lightheartedness.
The Cd closes with the Austrian-born Henri Herz (1803 – 1888). Probably the most classical of all pieces introduced in this collection and one of the most typical example of music destinated to entertain the wealthy middle class and nobleman of Paris of the first half of the 19th Century. His Rondò-Caprice retrieves us that the witchery that a city like Naples has on people started years, century and millennium ago and will probably live everlastingly as long as its people will be able of his unlimited creativity and boundless imagination.
(Album Notes by Edmondo Filippini)