Massimiliano Damerini (piano); Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma/Francesco La Vecchia
Naxos 8.573272 50:24 mins
Born in Rome in 1841, Giovanni Sgambati was a piano prodigy and later conductor who so impressed Liszt that he became his favourite student. Becoming the standard-bearer for non-operatic music in Italy, Sgambati devotedly introduced the music of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, Wagner and Liszt to Italian audiences. He also instituted piano lessons in a building which became the initial home of the Rome Conservatory.
And as Tommaso Manera observes in his liner note, his Concerto in G minor – composed in 1879 – was the first Romantic piano concerto by a composer from the country that had given the world both the instrument and the genre. But while he was writing this work, Tchaikovsky was writing his Second Piano Concerto, and the concertos by the great symphonists were already history. Sgambati had belatedly joined a star-studded field.
From Sgambati’s Concerto – which Liszt approvingly used in his classes – it’s clear that he had absorbed all the music of his predecessors, and he employed the Lisztean technique of transforming his thematic material as each movement progressed. There are times when one hears echoes of Chopin, Brahms and Schumann, but the writing is so dense, and skips so rapidly from one effect to another, that the ears are bamboozled.
There may be many incidental pleasures, but Sgambati seems weighed down – and his own voice muted – by the mountain of other people’s music he carries in his knapsack. And when it comes to cadenzas, he’s simply too modest to allow himself the ‘look at me’ moment the occasion demands. The appended Overture might almost have been written by Weber or Berlioz.