Martucci, Casella & Clementi: Chamber Trios

A plunge among the sunken composers of Italian chamber music and the salvaged ones. The program recorded in this album is a ticket for a journey of a century and a half, that is the distance between the composition of the Sonata “con accompagnamento” by Muzio Clementi (1792) and its transformation into the Trio ortodosso by Alfredo Casella (1936). An intermediate stop is represented by the Trio op. 59 by Giuseppe Martucci (1882). The route of this journey retraces a history that is not unimportant or unsurprising: it summarises the significance and vicissitudes of the chamber music produced by Italian composers from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards. In many texts of music history this topic is relegated in a note, or at most is dealt with in a paragraph, not even a chapter: an upgraded echo of the Fascist nationalism and dislike for Puccini that, for ideological reasons rather than for a historical or critical conviction, made themselves useful in raising the issue in the twentieth century. This recording, which presents a performance for piano, violin and cello, is a tiny artistic compensation, and an aesthetic and formal clarification. It leads us to consider and understand the role that Italian composers played also in the specific area of non-theatrical music.