Lorenzo Perosi - Piano Quintets; String Trio No. 2 (Roma Tre Orchestra; Matteo Bevilacqua)

Information

Composer: Lorenzo Perosi

• Piano Quintet No. 1 in F Major
• Piano Quintet No. 2 in D Minor
• String Trio No. 2 in A Minor

Roma Tre Orchestra

Leonardo Spinedi & Hinako Kawasaki, violins

Lorenzo Rundo, viola

Angelo Maria Santisi, cello

&

Matteo Bevilacqua, piano

Date: 2022

Label: Naxos

https://www.naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.574375

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Review

There are precedents for priest-composers and to that small list can now be added the Italian, Piedmont-born Lorenzo Perosi. Among some 4000 works thirty of his are chamber works. There are also numerous (if not a lavish number) orchestral works including symphonic pieces dedicated to Italian cities such as Roma, Venezia, Firenze, Messina, Tortona, Milano, Torino and Genova. Oratorios (which Perosi referred to as “my operas”) are there, as are a piano concerto (1916), a brace of violin concertos and a clarinet concerto (1928).

The chamber works include three string trios, sixteen string quartets and several suites. Among four piano quintets are the two we hear on this disc. Matteo Bevilacqua and Roma Tre Orchestra Ensemble give the sense that they hold nothing back. They respond spiritedly and with enthusiastic virility to his romantic chamber style and the qualities of the recording accentuate the message. Everything channels a convincingly vigorous inventive style tracing back to Schumann and as far forwards as Foulds, Catoire and Medtner.

All three works are in three movements and each spans about 20 minutes. The notes by Arturo Saccheti (in English and Italian) complement this unfamiliar music and he assures us that therese three pieces were written while Perosi was afflicted with grief over the death of his brother Cardinal Carlo Perosi in 1930. Even so they are not lachrymose but speak of touching affinity and a deep dive into the vigour of life and touching romance. There is more of the latter than the former.

The First Quintet sings in sighing and glinting pearlescence with a middle movement that mediates motion and meditation. The finale is all confident flourishes and triumph. The Second Quintet smiles and chaffs with lots of scurrying action and a second movement that cradles an affecting melody before returning to the busily motoric and ever so slightly furious finale. The Second Trio (strings only) has about it a neo-Mendelssohnian melodic way that is often gentle but sometimes haughty.

Given the dates, these are old-fashioned works but not caught in the jet of pastiche. They lack nothing in a life that pushes at the boundaries and which engages the listener. They seem impatient with anything suggesting the religiose or crustily academic. Listen and you will find affinities with other Italians of the pre-Second War years: Martucci, Sgambati and those on yet other much earlier Naxos discs of quintets by Mario Pilato and Achille Longo (8.572628) and Alfano (8.572753).

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

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Lorenzo Perosi (21 December 1872 – 12 October 1956) was an Italian composer. He composed 3,000–4,000 sacred works and, according to biographer Graziella Merlatti, was the most prolific composer of sacred music of the 20th century. Despite the relative obscurity of his name today, Perosi was a prominent member of the Giovane Scuola (Puccini, Mascagni, Leoncavallo, Giordano, Cilea) and was the only member who did not write opera. In addition to the oratorios and masses for which he is best known, Perosi also wrote secular music—symphonic poems, chamber music, concertos, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzo_Perosi

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Roma Tre Orchestra, founded in 2005, is the first academic Orchestra established in Rome and Lazio.

https://r3o.org/en

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Matteo Bevilacqua, winner of over 30 international competitions, is an Italian concert pianist.

https://www.matteo-bevilacqua.it/en/

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