The music of Alfredo Casella (1883-1947) charts a fascinating stylistic journey. Early in his career he was a bold progressive well and truly under the spell of Mahler (whose Seventh Symphony he arranged for two pianos), Schoenberg and Stravinsky. You can hear all of this in the remarkable A notte alta (‘In Deepest Night’), originally conceived for solo piano and dating from 1917 (the present reworking for piano and orchestra was fashioned for an American tour four years later). With its deeply personal programme of two lovers clandestinely meeting at night (revealingly, the title-page bears a dedication to Yvonne Müller, a student with whom the composer was having an affair), it’s a moody, at times downright sinister soundscape, the dark-hued scoring reminiscent of, say, Roussel’s or Bax’s Second Symphonies, but more harmonically adventurous than either of those imposing masterworks (Casella himself is not afraid to embrace atonality).

The two purely orchestral offerings are entirely different again. First staged in 1932, Casella’s opera based on Carlo Gozzi’s dramatic fable La donna serpente (‘The Serpent Woman’) enjoyed only modest success. The composer promptly extracted two hugely colourful series of Symphonic Fragments from the opera. Readers with a fondness for Respighi and Pizzetti will enjoy themselves famously. And, from time to time, I also detected the influence of Busoni’s superb 1905 incidental music for Gozzi’s Turandot. Inspiration runs comparably high in the Concerto for Orchestra that Casella composed in 1937 for the Concertgebouw Orchestra’s 50th anniversary and whose idiom now has rather more of a neo-classical flavour (Hindemith’s orchestral music from the same decade springs to mind).

Need I add that both performances and sound are absolutely out of the top drawer? Enthusiastically recommended. I look forward to future instalments.