We are pleased to share a special Musings, a preview of the program notes for our upcoming concert. Enjoy these notes, and buy tickets for the livestream of the concert to hear these pieces played just for you!
Pines of Rome
Ottorino Respighi
Ottorino Respighi was one of those composers whose imagination seemed to live in two eras at once. On one hand, he was a modern Italian artist writing in the early twentieth century, surrounded by the turbulence and reinvention of a country still defining itself. On the other hand, he was deeply rooted in the past—an avid musicologist who spent years studying Renaissance and Baroque manuscripts and reviving forgotten works. That blend of old and new shaped everything he wrote, but nowhere is it more vivid than in the trilogy that made him internationally famous: Fountains of Rome (1916), Pines of Rome (1924), and Roman Festivals (1928).
Respighi grew up in Bologna in a musical household. His father was a piano teacher, and young Ottorino absorbed music early and naturally. He studied violin, viola, and composition at the Liceo in Bologna, where his talent blossomed quickly. But the turning point in his artistic life came when he left Italy to study orchestration in Russia with Nikolai Rimsky‑Korsakov, one of the great masters of color and texture. That experience changed him. Rimsky‑Korsakov’s influence—his love of shimmering sonorities, bold instrumental combinations, and storytelling through sound—became part of Respighi’s musical DNA.
By the time Respighi settled in Rome in the 1910s, he was a composer who had a scholar’s respect for the past. He possessed the requisite ear for new harmonies and melodic content. All of this was wrapped in an Italian’s sense of orchestral drama. Rome itself provided the final ingredient. The city overwhelmed him—not just its monuments, but its layers of history, its light, its fountains, its trees, its festivals, its ghosts. He once said that Rome “sings” if you know how to listen. His Roman Trilogy is his attempt to teach us how.
Pines of Rome, the second of the three tone poems, is perhaps the most cinematic. Respighi wasn’t trying to write a symphony or a concerto; he wanted to paint with sound. Each movement is a scene, a moment in time, a place where the ancient and modern city overlap. And he chose the stone pines of Rome—those umbrella‑shaped trees that seem to watch over the city—as his silent witnesses. What drove him to write the trilogy was not nationalism or propaganda, but affection. Respighi was not a political composer; in fact, he often kept his distance from the rising Fascist regime of his time. What he loved was Rome itself—the physical city, the stories embedded in its stones, the way its past and present coexist. The trilogy is his love letter to that city.
For an audience hearing Pines of Rome today, the piece offers something rare: a chance to experience a place through sound. Respighi invites us to walk with him—to hear children playing, to feel the hush of ancient tombs, to stand under moonlit branches, and finally to witness the grandeur of a civilization that still echoes through its ruins.
The rest of the Musings for “Impressions: How Do They Do That?” are posted on the Bloomington Symphony website. Join us in person on Sunday, April 12 at 2 p.m. at the Gideon Ives Auditorium at the Minnesota Masonic Heritage Center. This concert includes Marko Bajzer’s Sky-Tinted Water, Samuel Dangerfield performing Camille Saint-Saëns’ Cello Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, and Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. Purchase your livestream ticket here.