Ottorino Respighi

Trained on violin, viola and composition at Bologna's Liceo Musicale, Ottorino Respighi spent formative months in Saint Petersburg as an orchestral player, and the lessons he took there from Rimsky-Korsakov gave him an orchestral technique that underpins everything he later wrote. From 1913 he was professor of composition at the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in Rome, and the city returned the favour with the three symphonic poems that carried his name abroad — Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals — in which topographical precision, historical imagination and spectacular scoring meet, and where the Pines calls for a gramophone recording of a nightingale to be played in the hall, among the first uses of recorded sound in a concert work. A serious musicologist as much as a composer, he transcribed and recomposed Renaissance and Baroque material in the Ancient Airs and Dances suites and in The Birds, work that did as much for the rediscovery of early Italian music as any scholarship of its day. Born in Bologna, he died in Rome in 1936. Giuseppe Martucci taught him at Bologna, where his studies ran from 1891 to 1899 and where the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue written under Rimsky-Korsakov's eye served as his diploma work; Max Bruch gave him composition lessons in Berlin in 1902. The Roman triptych came out over a dozen years, the Pines in 1924 and Roman Festivals in 1928, and from 1925 he toured the United States and South America as soloist and conductor while teaching until 1935. He fell ill at work on the opera Lucrezia and died four months later at fifty-six; the Violin Concerto in A major he left unfinished was completed by Salvatore di Vittorio and first performed in 2010.