The most comprehensive collection of Respighi's instrumental music ever compiled, bringing together classics such as "The Pines of Rome" alongside hidden treasures of chamber music.
All recordings are by Italian musicians and were recorded between 2009 and 2015: an ideal introduction and a perfect destination for anyone wishing to discover Respighi's colorful musical world.

Italy's landscape and history provided Ottorino Respighi with a deep and seemingly inexhaustible source of inspiration. Works as different at first glance as the elegantly neoclassical "Ancient Dances and Sages" and the opulently orchestrated splendor of the "Roman Trilogy" are united by Respighi's concern for his cultural heritage and its preservation as a living asset. In this sense, he is just as deeply Italian a composer as his colleagues who have dedicated themselves to continuing the operatic tradition, from Bellini to Puccini.

But Respighi offers far more than these two collections. There is the hour-long Sinfonia Drammatica, in which Respighi shows his most Straussian side. There is the pulsating, neoclassical Toccata for piano and orchestra, the contrasting delicacy of the orchestral Triptych after paintings by Botticelli, the restrained beauty of his Church Window Sequence and a series of concertante works for violin and orchestra - none of which quite fit the mold of the "Romantic concerto". Perhaps the least known and most fascinating work of his orchestral output is his sombre and brooding Metamorphoseon, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky in 1930 and thus written long before Richard Strauss's post-war elegy of the same name.

Respighi's piano and chamber music works illuminate complementary aspects of his personality, such as his flair for protracted melody and drama in the violin sonatas and the subtle turns of phrase in his piano pieces from his student days. When these recordings were first released, they earned enthusiastic praise from critics, especially the orchestral series under the direction of Francesco La Vecchia.