Cello and Piano
Italian composers and instrumentalists born in the second half of nineteenth-century Italy can be seen as the children of a true cultural revolution of the Risorgimento. This revolution was induced by the need to create a new national musical identity, disengaged from the iconic and dominant role of opera. In fact, for much of the nineteenth century, the operatic tradition had overshadowed the instrumental one, which began to regain particular momentum and diffusion only after 1860.
The three composers presented (Sinigaglia, Fano, Massarani) paid the price of living in a transitional historical moment. Like in a limbo between the "old" and the "new," between Romanticism - at the time entirely exhausted in the rest of Europe - and the first glimmers of a new musical language that would soon move towards deconstruction with the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Yet, the outcome of their work is worthy of historical and performance interest, and shows the necessity of rediscovering a significant portion of Italian music history. Certainly, their shared Jewish background and the consequent censorship of the racial laws from the early 1930s may have contributed to some extent to the oblivion that befell these names. However, a more thorough musicological analysis awaits to be conducted to examine the reasons for that historiographical void, in which that glimpse of Italian romanticism is lost, to suddenly transition to modernity.
Federica Nardacci, musicologist
Riccardo Pes and Pierluigi Piran - Studio session at Radio Koper Capodsitria (Slovenia)
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