In some of Respighi’s comparatively neglected pieces, his accustomed richness and subtlety of orchestral colour and his sense of the picturesque go with a certain lack of melodic individuality. Once or twice in Deita silvane (“Woodland gods”), for example, one wishes that the poems’ classical imagery would lead him towards an evocation or even a direct quotation from Italian music’s ‘classical’ past of the kind that so often renders his better-known music so memorable. Maybe he feared the accusation, often levelled at him since, that he could only achieve real characterfulness by means of pastiche or frank borrowing from the past.
In La sensitiva (“The sensitive plant”), however, his care for the imagery and especially the prosody of Shelley’s poem (in Italian translation) was so responsive that really striking melodic invention was the result. His setting of, for example, the lines about the rose “like a nymph to the bath addressed... till, fold after fold, to the fainting air, the soul of her beauty and love lay bare” is both vividly graphic and memorably beautiful. The orchestral colour of the piece is exquisite, the succession of ideas (the sensitive plant is image both of unhappy lover and spurned artist) a good deal more than merely picturesque. In a performance as expressive as this it seems one of Respighi’s best works, and a good deal more sophisticated than he is generally given credit for.
Aretusa is fine, too, with bigger dramatic gestures, even richer colour and some magnificent sea music, none the less effective for being obviously indebted to Respighi’s teacher Rimsky-Korsakov. The much better-known Nebbie (“Mists”; though seldom heard in its rich orchestral dress) is another example of Respighi finding a genuinely sustained melodic line in response to a text which obviously meant a great deal to him.
Deita silvane has some ardour, graceful voluptuousness and vividly bright, clean scoring, but only achieves the melodic distinction of the other works here in the fifth and last of its brief sections. It is nicely sung, though, and, like everything else here, played with a real care for Respighi’s line as well as his sumptuous but never muddy colours. The recording, richly ample in dynamic range, is first-class.'