Given its color by a pastorally evocative scoring of oboe and small orchestra, the Idillio Concertino lives up to its name with calm and gentle cantabile writing throughout in Wolf-Ferrari’s most neoclassical vein. The composer’s declared idol was Mozart, and all three of these works seek to recover something of a timeless beauty which many locate in Viennese Classicism. “When a piece of music touches our heart,” said Wolf-Ferrari, “we do not need to understand why it does so: indeed it is something that should not be understood, even were it possible to do so. We do not need to be botanists to perceive the beauty of a forest! In art, it is sentiment, not reason, which determines our reaction. Art does not desire an audience of initiates, a congregation of the faithful, but a pure and open heart.” This newly recorded album is for every listener who feels likewise. The solo instrument for the Suite-Concertino is the bassoon, but the dreamy mood prevails in the long-breathed opening Nocturne, which is followed by a quick, strumming scherzo, a lovely heartfelt Canzone and a gentle concluding Andante. This pair of concertos from 1933 is complemented by one of Wolf-Ferrari’s best-known instrumental works, the four-movement Serenade for Strings which dates from a full 40 years earlier, before the composer embarked on an operatic career. In this precociously mature work- written at the age of 17- Mozart is even more clearly a guiding light, as indeed he was for the composer’s contemporary Busoni, who lends his name to this chamber orchestra based in the northeast of Italy.
