Trombone Concerto

The Oscar-winning score for The Godfather Part II and the love theme for Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 Romeo and Juliet may have brought him his widest recognition, but Nino Rota was a fully rounded musician with rich and varied talents. Across his lifetime, he was a gifted and prolific composer for the opera house, concert hall, theater, and cinema. He was also a skilled pianist and conductor, a dedicated teacher, and director of one of Italy’s leading conservatories.

Rota was born into an artistic family in Milan and began studying music as a child with his mother, the daughter of concert pianist Giovanni Rinaldi. Nino was composing by age 8, and by 12 he had completed an oratorio titled L’infanzia di San Giovanni Battista (The Childhood of St. John the Baptist), the performance of which established him as a child prodigy. He was admitted to the Milan Conservatory later that year to study privately with the school’s director, Ildebrando Pizzetti.

In 1926, Rota entered the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome as a student of Alfredo Casella. At the time of his graduation in 1930, Arturo Toscanini, recently appointed music director of the New York Philharmonic, helped arrange a scholarship for Rota to study at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia with composer Rosario Scalero and conductor Fritz Reiner.

Rota profited greatly during his two years in America, not just from the formal curriculum at Curtis but also from his newly forged friendships with Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, and other leading American musicians, as well as from his immersion in this country’s popular music and, perhaps most influentially, his first experience with talking pictures.

The year after returning to Italy in 1932, Rota composed his first movie score (Trena Popolare, or “People’s Train”). This marked the start of a productive film career, which would, by the time of his death in 1979, encompass over 150 film scores. Though he enjoyed an enduring and productive collaborative partnership with director Federico Fellini, Rota perhaps enjoyed his greatest success with Francis Ford Coppola in the Godfather movies. His score for Part I was nominated for an Academy Award, but had to be withdrawn because Rota had borrowed from his score from the 1958 film Fortunella; Part II later won the Oscar for him in 1975. Despite the great diversity of his work, Rota’s creative philosophy was simple: “I’d do everything I could to give everyone a moment of happiness. That’s what’s at the heart of my music.”

Rota composed his Trombone Concerto in 1966 for Bruno Ferrari, principal trombone of the La Scala Orchestra and professor at the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan. Ferrari premiered it in May 1969 in the Great Hall of the Conservatory with the Orchestra dei Pomeriggi Musicali di Milano, the city’s leading chamber orchestra, which specializes in contemporary music.

The concerto’s opening movement follows a compact sonata form that takes an angular, fanfare-like strain as its main theme and a rising line in tight, dotted rhythms as its subsidiary subject. The angular motive is treated in a brief development section before the earlier materials are recapitulated and the movement comes to an energetic close.

The second-movement Lento is arranged in three broad structural paragraphs, with somber music moving at an almost funereal tread in its outer sections and a more lyrical episode led by the soloist at its center.

The third-movement finale is an ingeniously modified sonata form. The trombone announces both the spirited, scale-based main theme and the melodious second subject. The development section is based on not just the finale’s scalar main theme but also on variants of the angular fanfare motive from the first movement. The ensuing recapitulation begins, as expected, with the return of the main theme, but the music abruptly slows and changes mood as the arching second subject is given a dreamlike setting strewn with the soloist’s pearly arpeggios. The concerto closes with a rousing coda derived from the finale’s main theme.

— Richard E. Rodda

Richard E. Rodda has written program notes for orchestras and chamber series across the country and internationally. He previously taught at Case Western Reserve University and the Cleveland Institute of Music and is the recipient of a 2010 ASCAP Deems Taylor Award.