New recordings of neglected but compelling piano works from the spring of Giuseppe Martucci’s career.

Martucci composed all the pieces on this album during the year 1876. As Ilaria Sinicropi observes in her booklet essay, Martucci was ‘a composer in the making’, in the first flush of his talent. In finding his own voice for instrumental composition, he looked naturally northwards, to the other side of the Alps, and in particular to Schumann and to Brahms, with their strong narrative arcs, their expansion of traditional models such as sonata form and their richly chromatic but disciplined harmony.

The more adventurous language of the Capriccio e Serenata, op.57, was yet to come. Yet the first movement of the Piano Sonata – mysteriously neglected by pianists until now, with no other recordings in the current catalogue – already shows Martucci stretching his wings, and adapting the fantasy-style of Schumann to the ends of his own lyrical style. Sinicropi hears within it a powerful evocation of nature in the mould of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, and it prefigures the imposing intensity of expression in the third-movement Andante, with a scintillating Scherzo to serve as intermezzo and a Lisztian finale which synthesises elements of chorale, fugue and rondo.

The suite of Four Pieces, op.31, do not venture into the Sonata’s ambitious terrain, cast by and large in a vein of gentle introspection, but they too reward close listening (which again is only now possible with Ilaria Sinicropi’s recording). In fact the opening Nocturne is the most developed piece of the quartet, belying its title with fiery outbursts and unexpected pauses. The following barcarolle and Romance may be heard as songs without words in a stylish emulation of Mendelssohn, before a final Dolce ricordo (Sweet Memory) returns to the tripartite but eventful form of the Nocturne.

Finally, the Mazurka, op.35, makes a graceful encore, ‘deeply rooted in the Italian tradition and the expressive style typical of mannerism,’ according to Ilaria Sinicropi. Her affinity with this music is abundantly clear from her playing as well as her writing, and with this album she makes an auspicious debut on Piano Classics, which is sure to attract wider attention.