Composer: Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari
Performer: Costantino Catena, Amedeo Chicchese, Quartetto Guadagnini
Format: FLAC (tracks)
Label: Brilliant Classics
Catalogue: 96590
Release: 2022
Size: 243 MB
Recovery: +3%
Scan: yes
Piano Quintet in D-Flat Major, Op. 6
01. I. Tranquillo ed espressivo
02. II. Canzone
03. III. Capriccio
04. IV. Finale
05. Duo for Violin and Cello in G Minor, Op. 33
Sonata for Cello and Piano in G Major, Op. 30
06. I. Allegro tranquillo
07. II. Largo
08. III. Allegro
Ermanno Wolf-Ferrari (1876-1948) is a composer difficult to classify. A child of his time he kept aloof from the innovations of the modernists and dodecaphony. As the son of a German father and an Italian mother from an aristocratic family, he was born in Venice and went to study in Munich. His style is romantic, tinged with impressionism and the odd neoclassical hint. His aim was to create a “universal beauty” in his works, where no rules apply, but only a feeling of well-being and sensuousness. Wolf-Ferrari became famous as a composer for the stage with works such as Il segreto di Susanna and I gioielli della Madonna. His name is now emerging from the shadow cast by his wartime collaboration with Italy’s Fascist regime.
A series of albums on Brilliant Classics have revealed his gifts as a composer of chamber and instrumental music. This new recording is a new instalment of the recording project of his complete chamber music : presented here are the Piano Quintet, a masterpiece of Brahmsian proportions and impact, the Cello Sonata, full of nostalgic italianate lyricism, and the Duo for Violin and Cello, a forceful dialogue full of wit and lightness.
Following on from the Piano Trios, the Piano Quintet Op. 6 dates from 1900. Some of the cantabile melodies may remind us of Brahms, and the delicately embroidered harmony of Hugo Wolf, but Wolf-Ferrari’s characteristic sweetness of tone does not descend into decorative mannerism or affected sentimentalism: he was, to the core, a German-Italian composer with a foot on both sides of the Alps. More than any other of his early chamber works, the Piano Quintet successfully embodies his declared aim as a composer, to create a “universal beauty” where no rules apply, but only a feeling of well-being and sensuousness – especially in the ebullient Scherzo and Trio.
The Cello Sonata (1945) and Duo for Violin and Cello (1946) share the Romantic language of his early chamber music, but now refined by an escapist mode of neo-classicism, particularly in the lively dialogue of the Duo. The Cello Sonata is imbued with a gentle radiance throughout its brief, traditionally structured quarter-hour duration, drawing on a nostalgic vein of expression which comes naturally to the cello, and including literal echoes of Brahms in the slow movement.