20 Century Italian Piano Music
20 TH CENTURY ITALIAN PIANO MUSIC LINER NOTES CD1 reflects Mendelssohn’s models and those of Schumann, his GIUSEPPE MARTUCCI favorite author. In this piece, after a virtuosistic first section, we Giuseppe Martucci became famous towards the end of find a choral that interchanges with pearlescent arabesques nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, and he (maybe a reminiscence of Chopin’s “Scherzo Op.39”) and is then was well-known for his polyhedric activity as a pianist, repeated, at the end of the piece, in the form of a recitative. conductor, artistic director, teacher and composer. He was born The third piece, “Colore Orientale”, is a march in a tripartite in Capua in 1856, and in the beginning was taught from his form, and shows a strong variety of tone-colors and dynamic; in father Gaetano, who played the trumpet in the army. A child the same year of composition, Martucci arranged this piece for prodigy, he played in solo concerts when he was only eight orchestra. The “Barcarola” and the “Nocturne” create a more years old. In 1868 he was a student at Naples Conservatory, relaxed and colloquial tone. where he studied piano with Beniamino Cesi and counterpoint The “Tarantella” is an extremely lively piano piece: it under the direction of Paolo Serrao. Later he became teacher includes popular music references and denotes an achieved and director of the same Conservatory. maturity in terms of style control. This piece was also adapted Martucci contributed to the changes of Italy’s musical and reworked by Martucci in 1908 as an orchestral culture, and turned his attention to the European coeval arrangement of rich colors.
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