Nino Rota, the composer who put an indelible soundtrack to the Italian-American mob in The Godfather, wrote, like other film composers, a certain amount of abstract concert music. Some of his chamber works, mostly including flute, are enthusiastically collected and performed here by Italy's
Albatros Ensemble. What's interesting is that none of the music here sounds much like
Rota's film scores, not even the concluding Rotafantasy of contemporary composer Rico Abbate, which quotes several of them verbatim but then lets them dissolve into overtones or motives (the Godfather theme serves as the finale) so that they take on the quality of fragmentary memories. Instead,
Rota seems to take off from a French neo-classic language. The music spans more than 35 years, and it's perhaps unsurprising that the later pieces are more convincing than the two very slender sonatas from the 1930s; film music is a genre that rewards experience over youth, and even outside of that genre
Rota seems to have developed in the direction of a greater economy of means. Some of the music seems to comment on the composer's own cinematic stye. The Tre pezzi per due flaute (Three Pieces for Two Flutes) of 1971 are unique miniatures, boiling film music gestures down to absolute minimum forms. The Improvviso "un diavolo sentimentale" (Improvisation "A Sentimental Devil") seems to keep
Rota's emotionalist film language at a distance. The opening Trio for flute, violin, and piano (1958) is an accomplished work that could be taken for
Milhaud but has its own flavor. Chamber players should get to know these pieces, any one of which could serve as a pleasing curtain-raiser or encore that audience members will enjoy discovering.