GUIDO ALBERTO FANO (1875-1961): Il sogno della vergine, Nebbia, La mia sera, Lungi lungi, Passa la nave mia, Vere novo, Ad Annie, Genere umano addio from Astrea.

Description: No sentimental salon songs à la Tosti here! Il sogno is an 11-minute long symbolist-dream poem about a virgin dreaming that she is pregnant and gives birth. Erotic and ambiguous, with echoes of Christ and his mother's story, this 1913 work belongs squarely in the avant-garde of its day. La mia sera (1906-07) is a piano version of a 13-minute orchestral song and Fano captures the storm and subsequent calm of the text with piano pictorialism worthy of the great Romantic tone-poets. The ten-minute Lungi, lungi is also an orchestral original, setting an Italian translation of a Heine poem, and in which the piano also has long, descriptive solo sections in which you can hear the orchestra without missing it. Four short songs and another orchestral transcription from a stage work are more or less equally interesting. The only Fano on CD right now - and with an operatic contralto of the first rank! Italian-English texts. Sara Mingardo (contralto), Aldo Orvieto (piano).