Collection: Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi, Academic of Italy (9 July 1879 - 18 April 1936) was an Italian composer, musicologist and conductor.
He belongs to the group of real musicians responsible for the renewal of Italian music of those years, known as the "generation of the eighties", together with Alfredo Casella, Franco Alfano, Gian Francesco Malipiero and Ildebrando Pizzetti. Respighi composed many works of various kinds (sonatas, concertos, suites, operas, cycles for voice and piano and more), but he is known above all for a series of symphonic poems dedicated to Rome (the Roman Trilogy) of which the second, The pines of Rome, is the most famous and by far the most engraved.
He was also active as a transcriptor and musicologist; in this perspective we include the Ancient arias and dances for lute (suites I, II and III), orchestration of Renaissance pieces, but also the transcriptions for orchestra of Passacaglia BWV 582 by Johann Sebastian Bach, of Rachmaninoff’s Études-Tableaux and of pieces originally written for piano by Gioachino Rossini. He was also interested in Gregorian music and produced a Gregorian Concerto for violin and orchestra (1921) and the symphonic suite Vetrate di chiesa (1926), based on Gregorian melodies.