The collection presented in this recording by the voice of the mezzo-soprano Manuela Custer – accompanied by Raffaele Cortesi on the piano and the strings of the Dafne Quartet – offers us a series of valuable composers trying their hand at the genre of vocal chamber music. The common denominator of the compositions presented are the Dante Alighieri rhymes – certainly one of the greatest poets of all time – whose immortal verses inspired generations of artists over the centuries. Starting from the notes by Gioachino Rossini, the album then focuses on the historical period going from the nineteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, including, alongside famous names (Giacomo Puccini, Amilcare Ponchielli, Arrigo Boito, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco) a series of less known composers to the general public but of extraordinary importance for the understanding of this historical period.

Alfredo Casella certainly was the most ‘European’ composer of the famous “eighties generation”: he arrived in Paris as a piano student then as a concert artist, then he fully lived the varied cultural movement that filled the French capital in the early twentieth century where music, painting, dance and poetry represented the main trends of the continent. The songs for voice and piano constitute one of the most sensitive means of showing how Casella managed to deal with a culture that placed the mélodie in the forefront, by surrounding it with the subtle reverberation emitted by the intertwining of music and poetry, over the background of a social custom that resounded with precious literary streaks. The voice of Lorna Windsor, accompanied by the piano by Raffaele Cortesi, reveals in all its nuances these compositions, belonging to the period when Casella was staying in the stimulating cultural forge of a Paris at the top of its social and artistic importance.