Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Time Regained – Giacomo Palazzesi

Some time ago, reading the first pages of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu, I recalled that Mario Castelnuovo Tedesco had devoted an entire Chapter of his autobiographical memoirs1 to Proust. I immediately looked for that Chapter and reread it, intrigued. It focuses on summer 1928, most of which was spent by the composer lying on a hammock and reading all the volumes of the Recherche, while on holiday with his family in a bungalow at Forte dei Marmi.
There is much more than this, of course, since, for the composer, that experience proved to be a true stage of his musical apprentissage. In fact, he defined the Recherche as “the most beautiful of all symphonies”; he analyzed its form and the process underlying it, describing it as a real “method of composition”. This method embodied, for him, “the art of associating to another elements which are seemingly disparate and distant, of arousing unforeseen echoes, of letting concrete images emerge from the mist of a memory; finally, the art which, starting from fragmentation, and through a subtle and most skilled interplay of the themes , eventually reaches a wide and powerful organicity, architecturally solid and dense with meaning”. In this CD I gathered the first three of his guitar works and one of the Greeting cards. Three of these pieces were written between 1932 and 1935 and one in the Fifities; in them, more than in others, I glimpse something special, and I fell in love with them by virtue of that “something special”. Giacomo Palazzesi