Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Complete Piano Works- Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat (2000/2023) [Official Digital Download 24bit/88,2kHz]

Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Complete Piano Works- Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat (2000/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:07:35 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © fonè Records

Goffredo Petrassi’s interest in the piano goes back to his first approaches to music. He himself remembers the curiosity aroused by an old Viennese instrument dated 1826 – a contemporary therefore of Beethoven -which was in the house of an uncle at Zagarolo, the small town in the Roman countryside where the composer was born on 16 July 1904. After moving to Rome at the age of seven, Petrassi entered the Schola Cantorum of San Salvatore in Lauro. It is known that the experience of boy chorister, which followed the old tradition for training musicians for the papal chapels, represented a spiritual and musical deposit of the maximum importance for the future composer. The developments of these preliminaries were however still distant. His activity as chorister ended with the change of voice and Petrassi, coming from a family of modest economic means, started to work at the age of fifteen as assistant in a music shop. The shop was subsequently taken over by the HP-FabbricaItalianaPianoforti (Italian Piano Manufactury) of Turin whose managing director was Guido MaggiorinoGatti, a leading organizer and music critic in Italy at that time; the shop then moved to Corso Umberto, not far from the Conservatoire of Santa Cecilia. There the youngster had the opportunity, in his free time, to read scores and parts playing, self-taught, a piano of the firm. These efforts, applied in particular to the Deux Arabesques of Claude Debussy, attracted the attention of Alessandro Bustini – at that time professor of piano at the Conservatoire-who offered to give him lessons on Sundays gratis. Under the guidance of Bustini, Petrassi began to study piano fairly regularly, applying himself to the traditional literature of the instrument, from Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier to Chopin and Debussy. On the advice of Bustini, he started to study harmony with Vincenzo Di Donato in 1925, displaying a great talent for composition. His efforts were then directed towards entering the Conservatoire in the class of composition and, once an acceptable technical competence was reached, the piano was temporarily abandoned. The first compositions in the catalogue of Petrassi’s works date back to the “apprenticeship” period with Di Donato: Egloga and Partita, both for piano, were composed in 1926 and played by the pianist Letizia Franco at the Sala Sgambati in Rome on 28 November of the same year during a public test of Vincenzo Di Donato’s pupils. Egloga was never published and is today considered lost. Petrassi remembers adopting a musical scoring without bar-divisions, an ingenuous juvenile experiment influenced (according to him) by the reading of a piano piece by Federico Mompou, a twentieth-century stylistically Gallicized Catalan composer. The title of the composition, with its evocation of the classical-pastoral world, is proof of the literary interests of the young Petrassi and of his regard for the French cultural and musical tradition that was still alive in the Roman milieu, between the opposing forces of the followers of Ottorino Respighi, IldebrandoPizzetti and Alfredo Casella. Nor can a vague, perhaps unconscious, reference be excluded to the celebrated eclogue of Mallarme, L’Apres-midi d’un faun which inspired Debussy.

“This fine recording brings together all of Petrassi’s piano works. It is excellently interpreted by Roberto Prosseda, who carves out this handful of works as a complex and eclectic sound world, rich in relations to the culture and compositional research of those contemporary musics.” (Massimo Rolando Zegna, Amadeus, 1/2002)

“Do not expect tiring listening: just intense. This, judging by Prosseda’s important performance, is to begin with the sensitivity of the performer. The continuous playing with the history of music and forms sounds endowed with a fascinating emotional and syntactic continuity.” (Angelo Foletto, Suonare News, 1/2002)

“Roberto Prosseda has done a very praiseworthy job in taking up and performing Petrassi’s music, succeeding in giving a musical sense, a precise and convincing character to the Inventions, which we have never heard so happily realised” (Riccardo Risaliti, CD Classics, 11/2001)

Tracklist:
01. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Partita, I. Preludio: Allegro (02:27)
02. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Partita, II. Aria: Calmo con dolcezza (02:58)
03. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Partita, III. Gavotta (grottesco) Moderato (01:35)
04. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Partita, IV. Giga: Vivace (01:46)
05. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Siciliana: Andantino (01:55)
06. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Marcia: Allegro (01:23)
07. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Toccata, Adagio – Presto – Adagio (07:32)
08. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Piccola invenzione, Andantino (01:05)
09. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, I. Presto Volante (01:25)
10. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, II. Moderato – Più presto (02:58)
11. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, III. Presto, leggero (01:38)
12. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, IV. Moderatamente mosso, scorrevole (03:16)
13. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, V. Andantino, non molto mosso e sereno (04:08)
14. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, VI. Tranquillo (02:52)
15. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, VII. Scorrevole (03:20)
16. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Invenzioni, VIII. Allegretto e grazioso (02:31)
17. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Petite pièce, Allegretto e grazioso con spirito [e comodità] (01:58)
18. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Oh les beaux jours! I. Bagatelle: Andantino, un poco mosso (03:33)
19. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Oh les beaux jours! II. Le petit chat (Mirò): Allegro [non presto] (03:34)
20. Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Conversazione con Goffredo Petrassi a cura di Raffaele Pozzi (15:36)