Sara Mingardo is one of the few rare authentic contralto voices on today’s music scene, and in 2010 she won the prestigious Premio Abbiati as ‘Best Italian Singer’. Here she wonderfully interprets, in a thrilling world première recording, lyrical pieces for voice and piano by Guido Alberto Fano, with Aldo Orvieto at the piano.

G A Fano was born in Padua in 1875 and he died exactly 50 years ago in a small town in Friuli. His approach to song seems akin to that of Ildebrando Pizzetti (1880-1968), who spoke of a new interest among Italian composers for vocal chamber music: “Incipit vita nova”, he proclaimed, with Dantesque tones he greeted the salvation of the genre from the monopoly enjoyed by the previous generation, first and foremost, the huge output of Abruzzo-born Francesco Tosti. A “new life” on which Pizzetti embarked by shedding the yolk of pleasant melody and conventional cadential formulae.

These little known but highly attractive lyrical pieces, composed on immortal masterpieces by two great Italian poets, Giosuè Carducci (1835-1907) and Giovanni Pascoli (1855-1912), clearly show Fano’s distance from the precepts of late 19th-century drawing-room song.