Robert Trevino on Respighi's Sinfonia drammatica

Robert Trevino's first recorded collaboration with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI was a splendidly colourful performance of Respighi's popular Roman Trilogy (Pines of Rome, Fountains of Rome, and Roman Festivals) relased on Ondine back in 2023. For their latest album they have returned to Respighi with the much more rarely performed Sinfonia drammatica.

Written between 1913 and 1914 just after the composer had moved from Bologna to take up the position of professor of composition at the Liceo Musicale di Santa Cecilia in Rome, the three-movement, hour-long work is a grand, sprawling piece that has received only a handful of recordings to date. I spoke to Robert about his experiences recording Respighi's music, his thoughts on the reasons behind the Sinfonia's relative lack of recordings and performances, and why he feels that it is one of the greatest pieces that Respighi ever wrote. 

Respighi’s most famous pieces are his Roman Trilogy, which you recorded with the orchestra back in 2023. Is that trio how you first came to know his music? 

That’s exactly right, they were the first pieces of his that I came into contact with while I was a teenager. I think I was around fifteen when I heard them for the first time. And of course, as a young, rambunctious, and hyper-energetic young musician, Pines of Rome just really tickled my excitement. It made me very happy because it was grandiose, and an enormous orchestra, which was very exciting, although actually my favourite of them was always Roman Festivals.

Although they're often recorded together, Roman Festivals is less frequently performed than the other two, which always seems a bit unfair as I think it's just as good as Fountains and Pines. Why do you think it hasn't quite reached the same level of popularity?

Two easy answers: one, it's a larger orchestra so it costs more. And two, it is extremely difficult! It's not guaranteed the same success as Pines is. For a long time Fountains was my least favourite, but now I absolutely adore the piece. That one is fairly easy to programme because it's not very long, so it shows up more often just because of that. But Festivals is an effort if you choose to do it because it's a big orchestra, and it's very difficult. 

As a brass player I'm always fascinated by some of the more obscure instruments that composers ask for: in Pines there are the off-stage buccine and flicorni in the Appian Way movement, and also buccine again at the start of Festivals. Could you talk about what instruments Respighi envisaged, and what you used for your recording? 

He had these older instruments in mind, sort of Roman marching band instruments. We don't have them anymore and they're not very functional, so we used traditional trombones and euphoniums, and the trumpets of course. I asked the euphoniums and trombones not to play like those instruments, but with a much more blustery type of sound. I said it should be the sound of these screaming instruments that scares people. I don't think there’s anybody actually using the original instruments that he wrote for.

Pines of Rome was also quite innovative with its incorporation of recorded bird song. I suppose we're used to it nowadays, but I wonder what audiences at the time made of it, suddenly to start hearing the sound of a nightingale at the end of the Janiculum movement. 

For the bird noises we used the original LP, the exact one that is specified in the score, and I was also very insistent that we did not, as is common nowadays, superimpose the digital version onto the orchestra afterwards. We played it inside the hall and recorded it acoustically, because I wanted the orchestra’s sound to meld with it so that the harmonics of the clarinet and the strings would catch some of that atmosphere of the recording of the birds. It wasn’t an authentic gramophone as that wouldn't make enough sound, but we used old-fashioned speakers, and we placed it in a different part of the hall so that it came from far away, as we did for the concerts. And also with the brass, we put them in very different places so that when we recorded we would have that sense of immersion inside of the sound.

When did you first become aware of Sinfonia drammatica?

That came much later for me - when I was doing the Roman Trilogy with RAI, I was thinking, "well of course the trilogy is a big deal because that's the most famous", but I wondered whether there were other pieces that needed to be done, and in the process of going through his whole catalogue, I thought "what is this Sinfonia drammatica business?".

I got hold of the score and worked on it, and I thought it was one of the greatest pieces he ever wrote. So when I set out to do the Roman Trilogy, I already had the commitment from the orchestra to do the Sinfonia drammatica, because I said it is important that we first lay our claim to quality with the Roman Trilogy, and then we can introduce the public to something that is less known. And it took some convincing - the orchestra had never played it in its entire history, Ondine had never recorded it, and many people thought it was a terrible piece of music! But now that we have recorded it, everybody has been very positive and says that it was worth the enormous effort required to do the piece. 

I gather from letters Respighi wrote that he didn't find it easy to write such a large-scale work, which was a lot longer than any orchestral pieces he had written at that point. I wonder if he felt any sense of pressure about continuing some kind of Italian symphonic tradition, especially with Martucci as his teacher, and whether that contributed to the difficulty he found?

I think that might be true. I also think Respighi really struggled a lot with his compositions; they were not easy affairs for him. Even though he had a teacher who was writing symphonies, it was never really the most common idiom for Italian composers, and so I think writing a symphony was quite a big task. I put it right in the same category as the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies of Mahler, the Ninth Symphony of Bruckner, and a little bit with Ravel’s La valse. I do so because it is addressing some of the same things: the transformation of Europe, a loss of the previous sensibility of Europe and the world, the introduction of mass murder on a scale that was unheard of before, and political and economic changes of the most radical style. I think there was so much angst that needed to be expressed that it really was a big effort for him, and I think the piece communicates an enormous amount. 

What was the recording process like?

Recordings are a complicated affair because they are not live performances, and this piece requires a little bit of the sweat, blood and tears of a live performance for people to really feel its full impact. When you get to the finale, for example, and you come to this long march starting with the oboe and this strange procession towards the end, I noticed that in the reality of the moment it was very severe and heartfelt, and everybody felt overwhelmed with grief. Of course you can get that in a recording, but not in the same way as a live performance. So the whole purpose of recording it was to inspire people to think about programming it in live concerts more, to encourage them to traverse the land of the Sinfonia drammatica. 

These pieces require a lot of time and investigation: it's like climbing to the top of Mount Everest, and we need guidance and a lot of experience to get there. With Sinfonia drammatica there's not really any history with the piece, so it needs more of that in order for people to see its full value. When I was starting out on this work, the concertmaster of the orchestra said to me "when we saw this piece on the recording schedule, we thought, 'How are we going to manage this?'" And he said, "But it's Robert conducting, he knows the way, and everything will be fine”. So they were really in my hands, and we were able to do that particular job because it is based on trust. 

I found it quite touching when you mentioned in your booklet note that by the end of it, you heard members of the orchestra singing bits of the piece and talking about it in cafes. So it seems like it really did make an impression once they got to know it. 

Absolutely. My wife was around for the recording process, and she was coming to me afterwards and saying, "I don't understand why this piece isn't being played more often. This is so incredible, so deep and profound." Of course I’m very happy with the recording and I think we did a great job, but when I was conducting it I was thinking, “I wish we had an audience to listen to this right now”, because I think they would have been stunned by the weight of the piece. We never got to do it in concert, but we spent a whole week rehearsing and then another week recording it. 

Why do you think it is that it's so unknown and hardly ever performed? 

It's technically very difficult and requires a great deal of investigation. It's not like the Roman Trilogy where its orchestrational brilliance takes care of itself. With those pieces, a lot of things are automatically effective, although I recorded them because I wanted to illuminate them and try to bring more seriousness and thoughtfulness to the interpretation, not just to go for splashy sonic expressions. I think sometimes people approach Respighi with the idea that he's just a kind of cinematic composer. I don't see that at all, and if you say that, why don’t you say that about Ravel or Stravinsky? Maybe because of the zeitgeist, because of reviewers and commentators or maybe because of interpretation, people have relegated Respighi to this sort of cliched music, which I don't think it is at all. 

Stylistically it doesn't sound to me at all like those Roman pieces, and I believe even Elsa [his wife and biographer], claimed that his style didn't really begin until Fountains of Rome two years later. What do you think were the influences on Respighi when he was writing this piece? 

I do hear a lot of the Ninth Symphony of Mahler, I hear Alpine Symphony, Also sprach Zarathustra, Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique, Tchaikovsky Sixth, Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade for sure, and a little Rachmaninoff in there as well. So I hear all of those references, but very distinctly Respighi all the same. In the same way that you hear Mahler and you go, "Oh, there's Siegfried.” But is he trying to make it Siegfried? No, it’s just the way these things operate. So if you listen to a Schumann Symphony and you hear Beethoven Five in it, that's not because he's quoting it necessarily, but it's just so much a part of the aesthetic vernacular that it comes out. 

Finally, what are your future plans with the orchestra? Any more Respighi, perhaps?

We have already finished another Respighi disc, which will include Church Windows and Brazilian Impressions, and we also have a Verdi album coming out: the complete mezzo-soprano repertoire with Justina Gringytė. And then in September we will start recording another thing, but I can’t tell you what that is yet!