As presented here, Alfredo Casella’s musical language is imposing, his structures formidable and, in the case of the enormously exciting march-threnody Elegia eroica, “to the memory of a soldier killed in the [First] war”, both powerful and, towards its close, deeply contemplative. But the principal work is the broad-shouldered, 46‑minute Third Symphony that Casella started composing in 1939, a commission from Frederick Stock for the 50th anniversary of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and truly representative of the conflicts and contradictions that were at the cold heart of Mussolini’s Italy…and of Casella’s attitude to it, as David Gallagher’s perceptive note makes abundantly clear. Here was a man who, although married to a Jewish woman, aligned his thinking with Il Duce and his minions; and, while he did eventually see the error of his thoughts, they took their time changing.

The added irony is that years earlier Casella had been commissioned by Mahler (Jewish, of course) to arrange his Seventh Symphony for piano duet, and you can indeed hear echoes of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony at around 7'28" into Casella’s sizeable finale. The Scherzo is at times a dead ringer for the Scherzo of Mahler’s Sixth or of Shostakovich’s Fifth but even more surprising are the striking premonitions of Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony at around 6'24" into the often beautiful second movement (similarly Casella’s use of the piano). Honegger is another stylistic point of reference, so what we have here is a sort of musical temperature gauge, a gauge that simultaneously clocks the overall mood of the period.

La Vecchia’s Rome performance is pretty good as far as it goes, which isn’t very far at the sensitively scored start of the second movement (solo violin and woodwinds), where the violinist’s intonation is somewhat suspect. Alun Francis has also prepared a very good Casella Third Symphony (CPO, with Italia, Op 11) but one lives in hope that Gianandrea Noseda and the BBC Philharmonic, whose account of the Second Symphony (Chandos, 8/10) was so fine, will in due course grant us their interpretation of the Third. It’s a compelling piece and deserves strong, well-played advocacy; but those who have been investing in the Naxos Casella series certainly need not hold back.