ROMANCES - VENTURA,MAZAR

ROMANCES ( CVLD204 )

Author : FRANCESCO PAOLO TOSTI
Performer : VALERIA FUBINI VENTURA, SONIA MAZAR

Notes

CLASSICAL. Words by Cesareo, Errico, Mazzola, Pagliara, Dei Fiori, D'Annunzio, Stecchetti, Cimmino, Cognetti. All music composed By Francesco Paolo Tosti.
Valeria Fubini Ventura soprano, Sonia Mazar grandpiano.
Digital Recording made at Eden-Tamir Music Center Hamaayam, Ein Karem, Jerusalem on January 2005

Francesco Paolo Tosti was born in Ortona in 1846. He showed early his passion for music and in particular for singing, becoming a student of Mercadante at the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory in Naples. He earned his living in the early years of his career as a music and singing teacher in Ancona. Dissatisfied with provincial life, he moved to Rome where he performed as a singer, making the most of his beautiful tenor voice. In the capital he met many important people, including Princess Margherita of Savoy who chose him as her singing teacher, but his acquaintance with D'Annunzio and the painter Michetti were crucial for Tosti: many of his most beautiful romances were composed precisely on D'Annunzio's lyrics.
Tosti's copious musical production consists almost exclusively of compositions for voice and piano that can be further divided into chansons, romances, popular Italian songs, songs. His work has had alternating fortunes throughout the twentieth century, depending on the cultural and social climate in which it was enjoyed and performed. With his more than three hundred and fifty romances, Tosti has undoubtedly given autonomy to this genre that had until then lived in the shadow of melodrama. Tosti created the romance as an autonomous and original form: in it the sweet melodicity, the simplicity of the melodic line marry perfectly with the poetic text, always chosen with refined sensitivity from the texts of the major Italian poets of the time and sometimes even from those of foreign poets such as Hugo, Verlaine, De Musset, etc. Impervious to the winds of the avant-garde that blew strongly in those years, he gave vent to a refined melodicity, predominantly sentimental but always fresh and in good taste. He enjoyed undoubted success in Umberto I's Italy and in Victorian England, even if he was often criticized for being content with this worldly success in the elegant salons of the Belle Époque.
Called by some the Italian Schubert, he has the undoubted merit of immediate enjoyment and recognisability, and it is precisely on this characteristic that his great success was founded. This ease of listening and his immediate enjoyment can be reproached as a defect but can also be considered as a great quality: in his romances there is no room for preciosity or useless technical superstructures alien to his personality. Behind this apparent simplicity and immediacy we still find his balance and his innate refinement that have contributed to making his romances still enjoyable in a cultural and social context so distant and different from the one in which they were created.
(Enrico Fubini)