Cacioppo's new Navona Records CD Ritornello receives accolades at home and abroad.
Cacioppo's new Navona Records CD Ritornello receives accolades at home and abroad. Nominated for a Grammy this year in the category for best chamber music performance, and listed among Fanfare magazine's annual best picks, the Italian critic Filippo Focosi writes from his base in Tuscany:
In this his third CD for Navona, the American composer Curt Cacioppo reaches back to his Italian origins, whose influence oozes forth not only in the redolent landscapes or personal evocations suggested by certain titles (Trulli Sketches, Sorriso a Catania, Venezia Mia, and so on), but also in the abundant lyricism of each of piece. A copious range of themes - the fruit of operatic citations, folkloric elaborations, but above all, original creations imbued with great freshness and communicativity - is at the center of the three compositions presented here, and performed by the same Cacioppo
at the piano along with the superb Quartetto di Venezia. From the initial quartet, to the piano suite, to the final quintet for piano and strings,
Cacioppo exploits all of the wealth of his technical resources to "play" with the melodies, subject them to dynamic contrasts or elusive variations, or weave them within webs of dense contrapuntal activity, creating a range of expression multiform yet coherent. A composer at the apex of his creativity, who avails himself of the partnership of excellent musicians to translate into magnificent sonority his fertile compositional imagination.
