Pini di Roma

The second of the Roman trilogy, premiered in Rome in 1924, uses the city's pines as anchors of memory: children romping in the Villa Borghese, chant echoing from a catacomb, a nightingale on the Janiculum at night — where Respighi calls for an actual recording of birdsong, one of the earliest uses of a phonograph in orchestral music — and finally a ghostly legion marching up the Appian Way in an overwhelming brass crescendo.