Petrassi: Complete Piano Works: Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat Roberto Prosseda

• Goffredo Petrassi (1904 - 2003): Partita, I. Preludio:
• 1Petrassi: Partita, I. Preludio: Allegro02:27
• Partita, II. Aria:
• 2Petrassi: Partita, II. Aria: Calmo con dolcezza02:58
• Partita, III. Gavotta (grottesco) Moderato:
• 3Petrassi: Partita, III. Gavotta (grottesco) Moderato01:35
• Partita, IV. Giga:
• 4Petrassi: Partita, IV. Giga: Vivace01:42
• Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Siciliana:
• 5Petrassi: Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Siciliana: Andantino01:51
• Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Marcia:
• 6Petrassi: Siciliana e Marcia per pianoforte a 4 mani, Marcia: Allegro01:20
• Toccata, Adagio – Presto – Adagio:
• 7Petrassi: Toccata, Adagio – Presto – Adagio 07:28
• Piccola invenzione, Andantino:
• 8Petrassi: Piccola invenzione, Andantino00:58
• Invenzioni, I. Presto Volante:
• 9Petrassi: Invenzioni, I. Presto Volante01:18
• Invenzioni, II. Moderato – Più presto:
• 10Petrassi: Invenzioni, II. Moderato – Più presto03:02
• Invenzioni, III. Presto, leggero:
• 11Petrassi: Invenzioni, III. Presto, leggero01:35
• Invenzioni, IV. Moderatamente mosso, scorrevole:
• 12Petrassi: Invenzioni, IV. Moderatamente mosso, scorrevole03:16
• Invenzioni, V. Andantino, non molto mosso e sereno:
• 13Petrassi: Invenzioni, V. Andantino, non molto mosso e sereno04:11
• Invenzioni, VI. Tranquillo:
• 14Petrassi: Invenzioni, VI. Tranquillo02:49
• Invenzioni, VII. Scorrevole:
• 15Petrassi: Invenzioni, VII. Scorrevole03:20
• Invenzioni, VIII. Allegretto e grazioso:
• 16Petrassi: Invenzioni, VIII. Allegretto e grazioso02:25
• Petite pièce, Allegretto e grazioso con spirito [e comodità]:
• 17Petrassi: Petite pièce, Allegretto e grazioso con spirito [e comodità]01:51
• Oh les beaux jours! I. Bagatelle:
• 18Petrassi: Oh les beaux jours! I. Bagatelle: Andantino, un poco mosso03:33
• Oh les beaux jours! II. Le petit chat (Mirò):
• 19Petrassi: Oh les beaux jours! II. Le petit chat (Mirò): Allegro [non presto]03:32
• Conversazione con Goffredo Petrassi a cura di Raffaele Pozzi:
• 20Petrassi: Conversazione con Goffredo Petrassi a cura di Raffaele Pozzi15:37
• Total Runtime01:06:48

Info for Petrassi: Complete Piano Works: Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat

Goffredo Petrassi's interest in the piano goes back to his first approaches to music. He himself remembers the curiosity aroused by an old Viennese instrument dated 1826 - a contemporary therefore of Beethoven -which was in the house of an uncle at Zagarolo, the small town in the Roman countryside where the composer was born on 16 July 1904. After moving to Rome at the age of seven, Petrassi entered the Schola Cantorum of San Salvatore in Lauro. It is known that the experience of boy chorister, which followed the old tradition for training musicians for the papal chapels, represented a spiritual and musical deposit of the maximum importance for the future composer. The developments of these preliminaries were however still distant. His activity as chorister ended with the change of voice and Petrassi, coming from a family of modest economic means, started to work at the age of fifteen as assistant in a music shop. The shop was subsequently taken over by the HP-FabbricaItalianaPianoforti (Italian Piano Manufactury) of Turin whose managing director was Guido MaggiorinoGatti, a leading organizer and music critic in Italy at that time; the shop then moved to Corso Umberto, not far from the Conservatoire of Santa Cecilia. There the youngster had the opportunity, in his free time, to read scores and parts playing, self-taught, a piano of the firm. These efforts, applied in particular to the Deux Arabesques of Claude Debussy, attracted the attention of Alessandro Bustini - at that time professor of piano at the Conservatoire-who offered to give him lessons on Sundays gratis. Under the guidance of Bustini, Petrassi began to study piano fairly regularly, applying himself to the traditional literature of the instrument, from Bach's Well-tempered Klavier to Chopin and Debussy. On the advice of Bustini, he started to study harmony with Vincenzo Di Donato in 1925, displaying a great talent for composition. His efforts were then directed towards entering the Conservatoire in the class of composition and, once an acceptable technical competence was reached, the piano was temporarily abandoned. The first compositions in the catalogue of Petrassi's works date back to the "apprenticeship" period with Di Donato: Egloga and Partita, both for piano, were composed in 1926 and played by the pianist Letizia Franco at the Sala Sgambati in Rome on 28 November of the same year during a public test of Vincenzo Di Donato's pupils. Egloga was never published and is today considered lost. Petrassi remembers adopting a musical scoring without bar-divisions, an ingenuous juvenile experiment influenced (according to him) by the reading of a piano piece by Federico Mompou, a twentieth-century stylistically Gallicized Catalan composer. The title of the composition, with its evocation of the classical-pastoral world, is proof of the literary interests of the young Petrassi and of his regard for the French cultural and musical tradition that was still alive in the Roman milieu, between the opposing forces of the followers of Ottorino Respighi, IldebrandoPizzetti and Alfredo Casella. Nor can a vague, perhaps unconscious, reference be excluded to the celebrated eclogue of Mallarme, L'Apres-midi d'un faun which inspired Debussy.

"This fine recording brings together all of Petrassi's piano works. It is excellently interpreted by Roberto Prosseda, who carves out this handful of works as a complex and eclectic sound world, rich in relations to the culture and compositional research of those contemporary musics." (Massimo Rolando Zegna, Amadeus, 1/2002)

"Do not expect tiring listening: just intense. This, judging by Prosseda's important performance, is to begin with the sensitivity of the performer. The continuous playing with the history of music and forms sounds endowed with a fascinating emotional and syntactic continuity." (Angelo Foletto, Suonare News, 1/2002)

"Roberto Prosseda has done a very praiseworthy job in taking up and performing Petrassi's music, succeeding in giving a musical sense, a precise and convincing character to the Inventions, which we have never heard so happily realised" (Riccardo Risaliti, CD Classics, 11/2001)

Roberto Prosseda, piano

Roberto Prosseda
born in Latina, Italy, in 1975 is a leader DECCA artist.

His Decca albums dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn, including the Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly, have won much acclaim in the press, including the CHOC from Le Monde de la Musique Classique, the Diapason d'Or and Chamber Music CD of the Month in the UK's Classic FM magazine. In 2010, Deutsche Grammophon selected twelve recordings by Prosseda to add to the box set, "Classic Gold". In 2014 Prosseda completed his 10-year project of recording all of Mendelssohn's piano works for Decca in 9 CDs.

Roberto Prosseda has performed regularly with some of the world's most important orchestras, such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra, New Japan Philharmonic, Moscow State Philharmonic, Accademia Santa Cecilia, Filarmonica della Scala, Bruxelles Philharmonic, Residentie Orkest, Netherlands Symphony, Berliner Symphoniker, Staatskapelle Weimar, Calgary Philharmonic, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus. He performed under the baton of David Afkham, Marc Albrecht, Christian Arming, Harry Bickett, Oleg Caetani, Riccardo Chailly, Pietari Inkinen, Yannik Nezeit-Seguin, George Pehlivanian, Dennis Russel-Davies, Tugan Sokhiev, Jan Willem de Vriend, Jurai Valcuha.

Other than Mendelssohn, whose piano music he is considered to be a leading interpreter of today, Prosseda's interpretations of Mozart, Schubert, Schumann and Chopin have been particularly praised, and these composers have in fact featured in Prosseda's recent Decca recordings. In 2015, Prosseda started the complete recording of Mozart's Piano Sonatas with a modern piano tuned with unequal temperament. An active proponent of Italian music, Prosseda also recorded the complete piano works of Petrassi and Dallapiccola.

In September 2011 Prosseda gave his debut on the pedal piano, performing the Concerto for Pedal Piano by Gounod in the world premiere version for modern instrument. Concerts are planned in the coming seasons on this instrument, rediscovering the original compositions by Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt and Charles Valentin Alkan.

Several composers, including Ennio Morricone, have already written new pieces for pedal piano for Roberto Prosseda, and a recording of Gounod's four pieces for pedal piano and orchestra with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana conducted by Howard Shelley, was released on the Hyperion label in fall 2013. Roberto Prosseda is also very active in musical divulgation. He wrote the book "Il Pianoforte" for Curci Editori (2013) and made three documentaries dedicated to Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt (Euroarts).

He is currently artistic advisor at Cremona Musica International Exhibitions and president of the Associazione Mendelssohn.

Booklet for Petrassi: Complete Piano Works: Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat