Ottorino Respighi’s Il Tramonto is the first of a six-work string of Mediterranean pearls for voice and string quartet offered up by soprano Joanna Tylkowska-Drozd, the Baltic Neopolis Quartet and guests the April String Trio. These, in some cases lesser-known, works by the late-Romantic and/or early modernist Italian composers Nino Rota, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppe Martucci, Giuseppe Verdi, Joaquín Turina (of Italian descent on his father’s side) and Mr. Respighi are by turns, lyrical, prayerful and emotional, the listener bathed in glares and shadows of a Mediterranean sunset.
