Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Guitar Concerto No. 1 in D major, Op. 99

Of the composers who wholeheartedly embraced guitar music, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco stands out. Having demonstrated an innate musical talent at an early age, he earned a degree in piano and composition while still very young under the guidance of Ildebrando Pizzetti. By the 1930’s, Castelnuovo-Tedesco was among the best known Italian composers and widely appreciated outside of Italy: important musicians such as Toscanini, Piatigorsky, Casella, Heifetz, Gieseking and Segovia performed his music. In fact, it was out of his friendship with Segovia that his love for the guitar was born and in the final years of his life he produced some of his most intimate and autobiographical compositions, written expressly for guitar. At the end of the 1930’s the enactment of anti-Semitic laws forced him to leave Italy and in 1939 he moved to the United States where he began to work, composing sound tracks for the film industry. However, his reputation as an extraordinarily well educated and refined composer spread quickly throughout Hollywood and allowed him to move beyond film to become a highly sought after teacher of music.

The Romantic period was one of the most extravagant eras in musical history, as these recordings show. All of the composers on this recording treat the guitar in extremely virtuosic manner, often exploiting the instrument's tonal and technical potential up to its limits and beyond, transporting the listener into the Romantic era.

Of all the ‘philharmonic’ or non-guitarist composers inspired to write for Andrés Segovia, none has left a larger or more varied body of work for the instrument than Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco. Looking back over his works late in life Ravelian mood, Castelnuovo-Tedesco cited the first guitar Concerto, Op.99, as his most successful work for the guitar. Today, more than 60 years after its composition, we can once again love this piece for its formal perfection and contrapuntal virtuosity. The slow movement, written as Castelnuovo-Tedesco was fleeing for his life from Mussolini’s Italy, is tinged with a uniquely lyrical nostalgia. Like many other artists of the time also fleeing the twin disasters of war and persecution, Castelnuovo-Tedesco settled in California. Here he was forced by economic necessity to compose for films and television.