Ildebrando Pizzetti - Harp Concerto in E-flat major (1960)

Ildebrando Pizzetti (20 September 1880 – 13 February 1968) was an Italian composer, as well as a musicologist and a music critic.

Please support my channel:
https://ko-fi.com/bartjebartmans

Harp Concerto in E-flat major (1960)
Dedication: Clelia Aldovrandi Gatti (1901-1988)

1. Andante mosso, arioso - piu vivo (0:00)
2. Andante piuttosto largo (9:06)
3. [no tempo marking] (15:20)

Margherita Bassan, harp and the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI di Torino conducted by Damian Iorio

He taught at the Florence Conservatory (director from 1917 to 1923), directed the Milan Conservatory from 1923, and was Respighi's successor at the National Academy of St Cecilia in Rome from 1936 to 1958. His students included Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Olga Rudge, Manoah Leide-Tedesco, Franco Donatoni and Amaury Veray. Also a music critic, he wrote several books on the music of Italy and of Greece and co-founded a musical journal. Pizzetti was an active supporter of fascism and signed the Manifesto of the Fascist Intellectuals in 1925.

A disciple of poet, playwright and revolutionary Gabriele d'Annunzio, Pizzetti wrote incidental music to his plays, and was highly influenced by d'Annunzio's dark neoclassic themes. One of Pizzetti's later operas, La figlia di Jorio, is a setting of d'Annunzio's 1904 eponymous play.

He was named to the Royal Academy of Italy in 1939. As noted by Sciannameo, his relations with the Fascist government of the 1940s were often positive, sometimes mixed; he received at one point high awards, and the one symphony of his mature years was the product of a commission from their Japanese allies to celebrate the "XXVI Centennial of the foundation of the Japanese Empire" (Benjamin Britten's Sinfonia da Requiem was also commissioned for this event, though it was rejected on account of its finale; its original finale was rediscovered after Britten's death and only premiered then.)