Camillo Togni

This Naxos disc gathers the music for flute of Camillo Togni, played by Roberto Fabbriciani, the flautist for whom most of it was written. Togni met Severino Gazzelloni at Darmstadt in 1951 and wrote the Flute Sonata, Op. 35 (1953) and the Fantasia concertante (1957) for him. Fabbriciani premiered the Five Pieces in Naples in 1977. Their friendship then led Togni to a run of works for flute, alto and bass flute and piccolo, some recorded here for the first time.

Most of the disc was made in Tuscany and Genoa in 2015 and 2016, with Fabbriciani producing. He plays the Sonata with pianist Massimiliano Damerini, Per Maila with Carlo Alberto Neri and the Five Pieces with guitarist Vincenzo Saldarelli. Two older recordings, made at the Teatro Grande in Brescia in the composer’s presence, complete it. The Three Duets with soprano Dorothy Dorow date from May 1980, the Fantasia concertante with I Cameristi Lombardi under Mario Conter from January 1983. Alessandro Turba’s booklet note ties the Five Pieces of 1975-76 to Luigi Dallapiccola. Compianto uses the series of his unfinished Lux, and the Anacreon fragments heading each piece make the set an implicit tombeau. The Fantasia concertante, premiered by Gazzelloni under Bruno Maderna in Cologne in 1958, is integrally serial, with a long solo cadenza before its last two bars. Inno a Iside (1979) repeats a palindromic phrase twelve times, alternating flute and bass flute. The Three Duets set lines by Maria Grazia Barelli, an anonymous seventeenth-century dialogue and a motto from Gertrud Schoenberg’s preface to Moses und Aron. Roy Westbrook, in MusicWeb International in 2017, found Togni "always inventive in exploring different expressive means, never merely provocative".

Naxos CD 8.573731, released in 2017 in the series 19th/20th Century Italian Classics, with booklet notes in English and Italian and the texts of the Three Duets.