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David Korevaar & Capre Diem String Quartet – Luigi Perrachio, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco: Piano Quintets (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:00:14 minutes | 1,10 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Da Vinci Classics

Luigi Perrachio (1883-1966) and Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (1895-1968) were both part of the flowering of Italian instrumental music in the first decades of the twentieth century. Perrachio was born in Turin, and spent his life in that city, performing as a pianist, composing, organizing concerts, and incorporating Piedmontese folk elements in his music. Castelnuovo-Tedesco was born in Florence, and also performed as a pianist; his music is suffused with a broad range of Italian popular influences, especially Tuscan. In 1938, he was forced to leave Italy as a result of Mussolini’s anti-Jewish laws, and he settled in the United States, where he became an important teacher to composers, including John Williams and André Previn. The musicologist Guido Gatti (1892-1973), who promoted both Perrachio and Castelnuovo-Tedesco in his prolific writings on Italian music of the period, writes of the effects of the upheaval of the first World War on music in Europe, and notes that Italian composers, by-and-large, resisted atonality and wrote music that was more accessible and attractive than many of their European contemporaries (Musical Quarterly, July 1932). Perrachio and Castelnuovo-Tedesco both composed music that never strays far from tonal norms and adheres to classical structures. They also share a love of the music of Bach and exhibit a strong sense of counterpoint in their writing, which is especially evident in the quintets presented here.

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