Collection: Ottorino Respighi

Ottorino Respighi, Academician of Italy (Bologna, July 9, 1879 – Rome, April 18, 1936), was an Italian composer, musicologist, and conductor.

He belonged to the group of musicians who were the true architects of the renewal of Italian music in those years, known as the "generation of the Eighties," alongside Alfredo Casella, Franco Alfano, Gian Francesco Malipiero, and Ildebrando Pizzetti. Respighi composed many works of various genres (sonatas, concertos, suites, operas, cycles for voice and piano, and more), but he is best known for a series of symphonic poems dedicated to Rome (the Roman Trilogy), of which the second, Pines of Rome, is the most celebrated and by far the most recorded.

He was also active as a transcriber and musicologist; in this context, his Ancient Airs and Dances for Lute (suites I, II, and III), an orchestration of Renaissance pieces, as well as his orchestral transcriptions of Johann Sebastian Bach's Passacaglia BWV 582, Rachmaninoff's Études-Tableaux, and pieces originally written for piano by Gioachino Rossini, are noteworthy. He was also interested in Gregorian music and produced a Gregorian Concerto for violin and orchestra (1921) and the symphonic suite Church Windows (1926), based on Gregorian melodies.