Francesco Molino (1768-1847)
- Grand Concerto (mi mineur) pour la Guitare avec accompagnement de
deux Violons, deux Clarinettes, deux Cors & Alto et Basse, Op.56
(c.1830)
Performers: Pepe Romero (guitar); Academy of St. Martin in the Fields;
Iona Brown (1941-2004, conductor)
Further info: Guitar concertos
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Italian guitarist and composer. His musical career, who was a descendant
of a well-known family of musicians from Piedmont, began in the decade
from 1783 to 1793, when he was a regular officer in the Piedmont
Regiment of the Sardinian Army, as an oboist and occasionally also as a
viola player in the orchestra of the Teatro Regio of Turin. After he was
discharged, during the period of the Napoleonic unrest in most of
Europe, he lived for several years in Genoa, where he met some important
French cultural and artistic personalities such as the famous violinist
Rodolphe Kreutzer. He returned to Turin after the fall of Napoleon and
the restoration of the Savoy family, and was appointed as a violinist in
the re-established Chapel of the King of Sardinia, from 1814 to 1818.
Here his two cousins Luigi Molino (1762-1846) and Valentino Molino
(1766-1824), who were slightly older than him and already fairly
well-known, were already employed. Only after he moved to Paris, in 1818
or at the beginning of 1819, did he start being successful as a guitar
composer, performer and teacher, although he never neglected the violin,
and went on playing it for the rest of his life. The signers and
dedicatees of many of his compositions suggest that he had relationships
or contacts in Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, England
and Germany. In Paris, where he had already published a Concerto per
violino e orchestra for the publisher Pleyel in 1803, he benefitted from
the support and patronage of the Duchess of Berry and of other members
of the aristocracy, and was placed at the centre of the great popularity
enjoyed at that time by the guitar. His success in Paris was due to the
importance of his teaching, the originality of his solo pieces, the
great number of simple pieces he composed for amateurs, and the quality
of his chamber music. The fact that he was famous is testified also by
some well-known contemporary reports about an extremely heated dispute
between his supporters and Carulli’s; the exact substance of this
dispute, however, is unknown. Although most of Molino’s works are for
solo guitar his best-known are his Grand Concerto Op.56, the two Grand
trio concertant Op.30 and Op.45, and the Notturni Opp.37, 38, 39.
