PCE Serves Up a Nino Rota Antipasto
By • March 24, 2025 0 98
A few well-known composers wrote film music, especially in the 1930s. Examples: Prokofiev’s score for “Alexander Nevsky,” Milhaud’s for “Madame Bovary,” Copland’s for “Of Mice and Men.” Conversely, film-score specialists like John Williams have written pieces for the concert hall. But can classical music lovers take the “serious” works of film composers seriously?
This month, PostClassical Ensemble — which in past seasons has profiled Silvestre Revueltas, who scored the Mexican film “Redes,” and Bernard Herrmann, whose credits include “Citizen Kane,” “Psycho” and “Taxi Driver” — made the case for Nino Rota.
Titled “Beyond ‘The Godfather,’” the 90-minute concert, a collaboration with the Italian Cultural Institute of Washington, was presented in the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater on March 18.
Born late in 1911 in Milan, Rota — who trained there, in Rome and at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute — scored not only “The Godfather” and “The Godfather Part II,” but all of Fellini’s releases between 1950 and Rota’s death in 1979; several by Visconti, including “Il Gattopardo”; two by Zeffirelli, notably “Romeo and Juliet”; and roughly 150 others.
In a program note, guest curator Claudia Gorbman amusingly wrote that Rota’s many concert pieces have been considered “like regional wines too delicious to export.”
Of the 10 works on the “Beyond ‘The Godfather’” program, conducted by PCE Music Director Ángel Gil-Ordóñez, just four were unconnected to a film score. And though two of them were initially written more than a decade earlier, all four date to the 1970s, when the composer was in his 60s. Director of Bari’s Liceo Musicale from 1950 to 1978, Rota died in 1979 at age 67.
The most ear-catching for this listener was the first-act music from the 1976 Maurice Béjart ballet “Le Moliére imaginaire.” The score begins, noted Gorbman, a retired University of Washington Tacoma film professor, “with a woman, Death, sitting down at a piano and playing it as a sinuous minor tune.” PostClassical’s skillful pianist is Audrey Andrist.
That haunting section, Moliére, was followed by the lightly scored Agnès (a character from the 17th-century playwright’s “L’ École des femmes”), the brassy Le roi and Sortie de roi, featuring PCE percussionist Tom Maloy and timpanist William Richards.
The ballet excerpts followed the complete “Concerto per archi” of 1964-65, revised in 1977, a string concerto in four movements: Preludio, Scherzo, Aria and Finale. Though Rota rarely made use of atonality, or even dissonance, in this work he was able to convey uneasiness and fearful excitement, recalling Bartók and Shostakovich at times.
Concertmaster Netanel Draiblate “sang out” in solo violin passages, as always; one could imagine an arrangement of the work for string quartet (Rota’s artful writing for double bass, played by Dan McDougall, would be lost, however).
The third non-film-score piece was the fourth movement, Canzone con variazioni, from Rota’s “Nonetto,” begun in 1959 and premiered in 1976 following various revisions. The nine instruments: flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello and double bass. Varied it was, with the spritely melody handed off from one player to another and rapid shifts in tempo and texture. All eyes were on the fine-tuned conducting of Gil-Ordóñez.
Of Rota’s concertos for specific instruments, PostClassical presented a fairly short one — Rota called it a “ballata,” meaning a ballad — for horn, “Castel del Monte,” written in 1974. The guest soloist, in royal blue, was Washington National Opera assistant principal Christy Klenke, an alumna of the Army Band “Pershing’s Own” and the touring Army Field Band.
Accompanied by harpist Sarah Fuller, Klenke cast a spell as she introduced the mysterious, mournful theme, soon taken up by oboist Fatma Daglar. Several segues later, demonstrating Rota’s inventiveness, the muted horn and oboe converse.
That inexhaustible invention and his rare, perhaps innate, gift for melody were Rota’s one-two punch as a film-score composer. The evening fittingly began with a poignant performance of the main “Godfather” theme by guest accordionist Simone Baron, who did the same at PostClassical’s “Midnight in Paris” concert in 2022. After the concerto for strings and the ballet excerpts, the ensemble — with guitarist and mandolinist Benjamin Harbert relocated up front — played the film’s “main title” waltz, Chris Gekker’s solo trumpet transporting us to Sicily (DAH-dada-DAH-dah-DA-dah).
Next, prior to the nonet and the horn concerto, came selections from Fellini’s “La Strada” and Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” (più Gekker, più Fuller).
“Beyond ‘The Godfather’” wrapped up with more of the Fellini-Rota partnership: Lo struscio, an extended “Amarcord” excerpt, with dance band and Mexican interludes; the Parlami di me waltz from “La dolce vita” (ancora Gekker e Fuller); and the circus-y Passarella d’addio from “8 ½,” featuring flutist Kimberly Valerio, synched to footage from the film (the other excerpts were paired with projected posters and stills).
“I think you would say: ‘No Rota, no Fellini,’” commented Georgetown University professor Gianni Cicali, the program’s guest presenter.
Orchestrated with exceptional charm, Rota’s film music — familiar to many of us and perhaps overfamiliar to some — was performed so expertly that one wonders why a Hollywood studio hasn’t lured Gil-Ordóñez and PostClassical (or Gekker, at least) out to the Coast. With luck, future programs by PCE and others will give audiences more than an antipasto of Rota’s non-film work, both for the concert hall and the opera house.
