What very intelligent programming. Anyone who enjoys the two Respighi pieces will find that these are performed so beautifully that it would be worth acquiring this disc even if the two rarities by Nino Rota and Giorgio Ghedini were of no interest. In fact both are welcome discoveries. Rota's piece is close to light music—you'll be reminded more than once of his sultry title-music to The Godfather—but with an occasional shadow over its gentle, neo-classical melodiousness and an unobtrusively ingenious craftsmanship that make the piece a pleasure to revisit. Ghedini, whose centenary in 1992 went almost unmarked even in Italy, is on this evidence a composer well worth investigating. His concerto is neo-classical, too, but often more angular and more bracing than Rota's piece. At times it approaches Stravinsky's neo-baroque works in its sparely elegant line, but with heavy accents and a pounding vigour in the outer movements and touches both of dry wit and of pastoral grace in the central one (which is charmingly and aptly marked andante fiorito—a 'flowery' or 'blossoming' andante).
Both the unfamiliar works are finely played; it is in the almost hackneyed Respighi pieces that you really notice the qualities of the Accademia Bizantina and realize why Luciano Berio has called them ''unique and precious''. They are a fairly small string orchestra (19 players on this occasion, supplemented by harp, keyboards, percussion and five wind in the Trittico) who make a distinctly Italian sound: richly sonorous (splendidly plangent violas), warmly expressive (lots of fine shading and rubato) and exceptionally well-balanced. I don't know that I've ever heard the big crescendo in the last movement of the Trittico more impressively controlled than it is here, and although their sound can be sumptuously full (there is a slight emphasis on the bass end of the string spectrum, with four violas, three cellos and two double-basses to ten violins), there is no lack of delicacy, a fine sensitivity in very quiet playing and never the slightest impression that they're trying to sound like a symphony orchestra. Their obvious enjoyment of Respighi's gracefully long lines goes together with a soloistic pleasure in the firm bite of bow on string. They are indeed (Berio again) ''a joy to the ear'', and the better-known, older-established European chamber orchestras have a rival to reckon with. The recording is excellent: spacious but not cavernous.'