Trio Arché - Bossi: Piano Trios (2018)

Italian Romantic chamber music, unique to the catalogue, in new recordings by an internationally renowned native group.

Born in a town on the shore of Lake Garda, Marco Bossi has a foothold on the catalogue thanks to his organ music: he was born into a family of organists and studied and worked in northern Italian cities including Bologna and Milan before taking up a post as teacher of harmony and organ at the conservatoire in Naples. He made contributions to the Italian operatic tradition which have largely been forgotten, but organists still play his sonatas and dramatic evocations of the Passion and the Transfiguration of Christ.

With Giuseppe Martucci and Giovanni Sgambati, Bossi also led a revival of thenative tradition of chamber music, which had been neglected in Italy after the string quartets of Donizetti. This new recording of his piano trios joins Brilliant Classics albums of piano trios and string quartets of Martucci (BC94968) and string quartets and piano quartets of Sgambati (BC94813). Both works are generously proportioned four-movement works in Classical form, the first of them dedicated to Martucci.

The slow movements are especially novel: the Larghetto of the first is designated a dialogue, which unfolds in long, unwinding melodies; the Adagio of the Second is overtly elegiac in mood, though it is dedicated to German musician Georg Goehler, who outlived Bossi for almost 30 years; the career of the Italian musician came to a sudden and tragic end with his death by drowning in the mid-Atlantic, returning to Europe in February 1925 from a visit to New York. This disc forms an engaging introduction to the impassioned idiom, too little known, of a significant figure in fin-de-siècle Italian music.

Marco Enrico Bossi was born in Salò in 1861 and died crossing the Atlantic on his way back from a highly successful concert tour in the United States. He was a composer of great personality whose thoroughly international outlook distinguished him from most of his Italian colleagues of his time.

Bossi was greatly admired by Verdi and Puccini, and as a concert organist and composer he was considered one of the foremost virtuosos of the period, along with his friends Cesar Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns. His composition style is based on the abstract and “absolute” aesthetics of Hanslick and Brahms, concentrating on purely instrumental and non-representational music, unlike most of his contemporaries, who wrote dramatic or programmatic music. In this he was of important influence on many of his students, including Malipiero and Ghedini.

This new recording presents first recordings of his two Piano Trios, full blooded and substantional works of great melodic and harmonic invention.

Tracklist:
01. Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 107: I. I. Allegro-Moderato
02. Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 107: II. Dialogue. Larghetto
03. Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 107: III. Scherzo. Vivace
04. Piano Trio No. 1 in D Minor, Op. 107: IV. Finale. Festoso
05. Piano Trio No. 2 in D Major, Op. 123: I. Moderato
06. Piano Trio No. 2 in D Major, Op. 123: II. In memoriam. Adagio
07. Piano Trio No. 2 in D Major, Op. 123: III. Novelletta. Moderato
08. Piano Trio No. 2 in D Major, Op. 123: IV. Finale. Allegro energico