Callisto Guatelli: Marche orientale

Phillip Sear plays an Oriental march, published in 1893 (but written earlier), by the Italian composer and conductor Callisto Guatelli (1819-99). ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Guatelli was born in Parma, where he studied double bass and singing at the local music school. After working as a chorus master at several Italian theatres, he emigrated to Istanbul, Turkey in the 1840s and began a long career as a court musician at the Ottoman palace during the reign of four sultans. Per the detailed account of his life and work on his Turkish Wikipedia page ( ), “[Guatelli] composed popular style works in which Turkish motifs are frequently used in order to introduce and popularize Western music to the Ottoman court and people.“ This is certainly true of this ’Marche orientale’, which, though published in France in 1893, must have been written in 1876, as it was dedicated to Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) upon his enthronement as sulta