Togni: Complete Piano Music, Vol. 1

Featuring

Aldo Orvieto
Camillo Togni
Gustav Mahler

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Album & Artwork

This album is the first of four volumes dedicated to the complete piano music of Camillo Togni, an influential Italian composer, teacher, and pianist.

Recording & Production

This recording was made in collaboration with the Institute of Music of the Giorgio Cini Foundation in Venice, which holds the archive of the composer Camillo Togni.

Compositional Technique

Togni's Tre Capricci, Op. 38, performed in Darmstadt in 1957, use serialisation as a regulating principle for form, affecting rhythmic articulation, dynamics, and modes of articulation.

Composer Biography

Camillo Togni, the composer, studied composition with Franco Margola and Alfredo Casella, and piano with Giovanni Anfossi, also forming a close friendship with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, a renowned pianist.

Composition History

A concert in 1938 where Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, a pianist, played works by Schoenberg, was a 'terrifying' and revelatory experience for the young Togni, leading him towards serial organization in his music.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Togni's compositional process was slow and meticulous; he claimed that every second of listening to his music cost him at least ninety minutes of work.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Togni's early piano works showed influences of Chopin and Bach, but he developed an intense leaning towards chromaticism, which his teacher Alfredo Casella described as a 'swing towards Vienna'.