.Bay Youth Orchestras of Virginia present  

Anniversary Concert of the Chrysler Museum of Art 
Performance by The BYSO Chamber Orchestra 
Featuring the music of Ottorino Respighi 
October 1996 

For this anniversary occasion at the Chrysler Museum of Art, the BYSO Chamber Orchestra performs music of Ottorino Respighi, inspired by three great paintings of the Florentine Renaissance. The Three Pictures of Botticelli which inspired this wonderful music hang in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. 

Sandro (Allesandro) Botticelli painted the tryptich in 1477-78 for the Medici. Respighi's music, composed about 450 years later, in 1927, is a lovely blend of antique, classical and romantic ingredients. The orchestra will perform the first and third movements. 

La Primavera (The Allegory of Spring) is the first picture, depicting Venus in an allegorical setting as 'Humanitas," the sum total of humanity's spiritual activities. The music reflects the dazzling light of the natural setting, with flower petals floating in the gentle breeze and ecstatic buzzing in the violins like so many cupids. There is a recurring triple-meter dance, as in the painting where the three graces dance in a circle. It has an 
antique flavor. The trilling violins triumph at the end. 

La Nascita di Venere (The Birth of Venus), is known playfully as "Venus on the Half-Shell." The beauty does indeed emerge from the ocean in a huge oyster shell. The music Respighi was inspired to write is other-worldly, as is the picture. Beautiful, string lines swirl about bassoon, flute and clarinet, evoking the gentle waves of the sea. A curious three-note tune enters un-noticed from below, swims along and soon gives way to another sweet woodwind melody. Both tunes are heard again, while flute, oboe and clarinet play the part of Zephyro, the warm westerly wind Mercury brings to the occasion. Now strings, horn and trumpet take up the first theme and carry it to a breathtaking, passionate level. At the height of emotion, there is an abrupt stop. Only the gentle waves have survived all this emotion. But the murmuring strings allow both melodies another brief hearing. Soon all evaporates into nothingness, leaving the hushed listener to unhappily accept the cessation of such beauty. 

"In the time of the elder Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificant, truly a golden age for men of talent, there flourished an artist called Allesandro... Botticelli. He was the son of a Florentine... who brought him up very conscientiously and had him instructed in all those things usually taught to young children. However, although he easily mastered all that he wanted to, the boy refused to settle down or be satisfied with reading, writing and arithmetic; and finally, exasperated by his son's restless mind, his father... took him to Fra Filippo, a great painter of that time, and, as Sandro himself wished, placed him with Fra Filippo to study painting... For various houses in Florence Botticelli painted a number of ... pictures, including Duke Cosimo's villa, one showing the Birth of Venus, with her cupids, being wafted to land by the winds and zephyrs, and the other Venus as a symbol of spring, being adorned with flowers by the graces. All this work was executed with exquisite grace." from Vasari: Lives of the Painters, 1568     

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Revised: August 28, 2002