Giuseppe Martucci (1856-1909)
Four Piano Pieces, Op. 31 (1876)
Piano Sonata in E, Op.34 (1876)
Mazurka, Op. 35 (1876)
Ilaria Sinicropi (piano)
rec. 2024, Bernareggio, Italy
Piano Classics PCL10318 [51]

Minor early works by a talented young composer, well played and clearly recorded; this is a disc which prompts one to consider how Martucci went on to absorb and reshape influences in his more substantial later works. This CD provides an opportunity to hear some of the music Martucci wrote in the early days of his career as a concert pianist and, indeed, as a composer. All three works, played with attractive lucidity by the excellent Ilaria Sinicropi, were composed in 1876, when Martucci was twenty.

Martucci was born in Capua, an ancient Roman city some 30 miles north of Naples. He received his early musical education from his father, a trumpeter and bandmaster; he soon acquired such skill on the piano that before he has reached his teens his ability was attracting admiring attention in Naples. At the age of 11 or 12 he was admitted to the city’s Reale Collegio di San Pietro (later to become the Conservatory of Naples). He studied piano with Beniamino Cesi (formerly a favourite student of Sigismund Thalberg) and composition with Paolo Serrao. The latter had been a piano prodigy in his youth, before settling to the teaching of composition at the Naples Conservatory; his pupils there included several figures, besides Martucci, who went on to become significant Italian composers, such as Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Franco Alfano. However, Martucci was withdrawn from the Conservatory in 1871 by his ambitious – and perhaps exploitative – father. Giuseppe returned to public performances as a pianist. Initially these performances were in Italy, but in 1875 he undertook a tour which also included concerts in France, Germany, England and Ireland. During this tour Martucci met figures such as Liszt, Saint-Saëns, Massenet and Anton Rubenstein, all of whom seem to have commented favourably on the young Italian’s performances. Indeed, Martucci’s concert at London’s St. George’s Hall in June 1875 was so well received that he remained in London for some four months, supported by wealthy patrons. In 1886 he was appointed Director of the Liceo Musicale of Bologna, where Respighi studied composition with him. By now he had a developing reputation as a conductor, as well as a pianist. Indeed in 1886 he conducted (in Bologna) the Italian premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde.

It seems to me that the music on this disc is best appreciated and enjoyed in the light of Martucci’s later career as a composer. Initially, Martucci’s career as a composer went hand in hand (as it were) with his career as a pianist. Consultation of a catalogue of his works shows that of the first 40 opus numbers only a few are not works for solo piano. These exceptions are a Violin Sonata in G minor (Op.22, 1874), ‘Pensieri sull’ Opera Un Ballo in Maschera’, for two pianos (Op.8, 1873), a Fantasia for two pianos in D minor (op.32,1876) and a Sonata for organ in D minor (Op.36, 1879). It is from the early 1880s that one sees a growing variety in the genres of music in which Martucci composed, whether that be in significant chamber works such as his Piano Quintet in C (1877, revised 1892), his Cello Sonata (1880) and his two Piano Trios, in C major (1883) and E major (1883). Alongside such works, he also continued to compose pieces for solo piano, as he did throughout his life.

His first substantial orchestral work was his Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor (premiered in 1879); this was followed a few years later by a second Piano Concerto, in B flat minor (1884-85). His Symphony No. 1, in D minor, was written c. 1888-1895 and his second (in F major) between 1899 and 1904. The one genre unrepresented in the catalogue of his works is the quintessentially Italian one of opera. To judge by his impressive song cycle Canzone dei ricordi (1898), Martucci would have been capable of writing a pretty good opera (assuming the libretto etc to be adequate), but he was either not interested in doing so, or his avoidance of the form was a deliberate rejection of the Italian operatic tradition. In support of that last view, one might remember Gian Francesco Malipiero’s observation – in an essay published in 1956 (‘ Contemporary Music in Italy’, The Score, 1956, p.7) that Martucci’s Second Symphony marked “the beginning of the renaissance of non-operatic Italian music”.

Martucci is an important figure in modern Italian music and for all that these early piano pieces are fairly slight, as much salon pieces rather than works for the concert hall – it is good that they should have been played and recorded as sympathetically as they are here. They belong to the composer’s youth and Ilaria Sinicropi’s performance of them captures their spring-like freshness. It helps that the recorded sound is clear and the acoustic pleasantly natural. Sinicropi plays these early pieces with the respect they deserve, but avoids any temptation to over-inflate them, to claim that they have a depth which they don’t possess.

There is, for me, a particular fascination in listening to the very early works of a composer – works which, in this case are clearly derived from models discovered in the works of Romantic composers such as Mendelssohn and Chopin – and reflecting on what the composer in question would go on to produce. In her booklet notes accompanying this disc Ilaria Sinicropi observes of the ‘Four Piano Pieces’ that they “reflect the distinctive trait of the melodic and harmonic progression of a ‘potential artist”. The titles of the Four Pieces (Nocturne, Third Barcarole, Romance and Dolce ricordo), especially the first three, clearly suggest the models by which the young Martucci was impressed. The Piano Sonata (op.34), to quote Sinicropi again, “references … the European composers who were closest to him, such as Brahms, Wagner [and] Grieg”. Brahms, it is worth noting, was to be a significant influence on some of the chamber music that Martucci would later write. The Mazurka which closes this interesting disc is “certainly Brahmsian, but also, at times, Chopinian and Schumannian” (Sinicropi). It is surely hardly surprising that a young Italian composer who – if I am right – wished to break away from the Italian operatic tradition, should draw on northern European models. What is striking is how and how, far Martucci was doing this in his very earliest compositions

Glyn Pursglove

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