Respighi was an accomplished string player: in Russia from 1900, while he was studying with Rimsky-Korsakov in St. Petersburg, he played viola in the orchestra of the Imperial Opera and, back in Bologna, he was the violist of the Mugellini Quartet from 1903 to 1908; he was also active as a concert violinist and had some experience as a luthier. Il Tramonto was one of the last works Respighi wrote before the possibilities of modal music struck him so forcefully, so it is still a shoot from the same bough that produced the D Major Quartet. The intense, almost cloying, atmosphere reminds me very strongly of Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht, of which its plot is very nearly a mirror-image: Lenau's lovers, in Schoenberg, finding happiness in adversity. -Martin Anderson, Andante