WORLD PREMIERE RECORDING

A teacher as well as a composer for the violin and viola, Alessandro Rolla has left us a catalogue of almost six-hundred works. After an engagement as first violin in the royal orchestra of Parma (1782- 1801), in 1802 he moved to Milan, where he was immediately enrolled as first violin in the orchestra of the Teatro alla Scala and remained until 1841, the year of his death.

He has been called ”the founder of the violin school, an excellent performer and a prolific composer”; indeed, his works were known throughout Europe and he even won the praise of the foreign press, which in 1812 considered him the most important Italian violinist of the day.

In the catalogue drawn up by Luigi Alberto Bianchi and Luigi Inzaghi, Rolla’s violin concertos are twenty-one (BI 506 to 526), for few of which we know the year of composition. The concerto BI 520, in G major, the BI 506, in C major and the BI 514, in D major. But we have no certain dates for the other concertos. As for the three concertos here featured, they exist in nonautograph manuscript copies that bear no dates. All concertos are in three movements, the first, according to an accepted practice, being the most demanding from both the technical and creative points of view. The second movement is a lyrical parenthesis, now warm, now more intensely touching or doleful; the third is a rondo, which in the case of BI 522 has the character of a polonaise.

The performance of these concertos has been based on the comparison between all available copies. Given the sometimes significant differences, the musicians have had to make choices attaining the phrasing, the ornamentation, the cadenzas (in handwriting and present in the various movements), and the instrumental forces which, for example, in the Milan copy of BI 523 call, in the Romance, for the flutes in place of the oboes.