 Franz Liszt ne tarit pas d’éloges à l’égard de son jeune confrère romain, Giovanni Sgambati. Une amitié se noua entre les deux musiciens, l’aîné faisant en sorte que son cadet rencontre Wagner et que ses œuvres soient publiées. Tchaikovski, Brahms et Grieg admirèrent son talent. Sgambati obtint des charges prestigieuses comme la direction du conservatoire de Moscou. Peu d’œuvres de Sgambati sont restés à la postérité, un concerto par-ci, une symphonie par-là. Pourtant, c’est la mélodie d’Orphée de Gluck transcrite qui demeure en "bis" de certains pianistes. Le compositeur italien n’a laissé que des pièces courtes pour le piano. Nocturnes, impromptus, études, pièces lyriques… C’est tout le catalogue romantique qui est représenté dans une écriture qui doit tant à celle de Liszt. Voilà un piano agréable et plutôt intimiste sous les doigts de Gaia Federica Caproriccio. L’art du chant est partout présent, celui qu’empruntent les compositeurs d’airs et d’opéras italiens du milieu du 19e siècle. Il ne faut donc jamais appuyer les mélodies et cantilènes, mais laisser respirer cette musique. Le Steinway & Sons de la collection Bussotti & Fabbrini qui est joué, possède des timbres très doux, un medium et des basses chaleureuses. De fait, les couleurs des impromptus, par exemple, se projettent sans forcer et l’ensemble du récital baigne dans une douce lumière. (Jean Dandrésy) Piano Classics presents the first volume in a major new series which promises to become the most comprehensive recorded survey of a central but now little-known figure in 19th-century Italian music. Born in Rome in 1841, Giovanni Sgambati cut an impressive but relatively familiar figure as a prodigious young virtuoso until, as a 21-year-old keyboard lion in the making, he was introduced to Franz Liszt. The encounter changed Sgambati’s life. Liszt, perhaps the single most influential figure in European musical life in the middle of the 19th century, took the young Sgambati under his wing, and his faith was richly repaid. Still in his 20s, Sgambati conducted the Italian premiere of the Dante Symphony and even the premiere of the first (lengthy) part of the Christus oratorio. There is an irony that the single piece through which his name has travelled worldwide is a piano Melodie, a sensuously achieved transcription of the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. Guaranteed to hush a rapturous audience into silence, it became the much-loved encore piece for the late Nelson Freire, among others. Too little of Sgambati’s music for his own instrument is known beyond the Melodie. This neglect is being redressed in style by the Italian pianist Gaia Federica Caporiccio, born in Florence in 1988. The first volume of a projected complete series of Sgambati’s piano works proceeds in mostly chronological fashion. Thus the curtain is drawn back with a flourish in the Gothic, Bachian arpeggios of the Prelude and Fugue Op.6. The two Etudes de Concert Op.10 already show Sgambati’s gift for sketching a tone-painting while focusing on a particular piece of technique. While Sgambati made considerable use of patterned keyboard figurations to seize an audience’s imagination, He was scarcely less adept than Schumann or Chopin at outlining a mood and then drawing a veil over it. Thus there are no sonatas or even long-form ballades here, but a series of evocative impromptus, lyric pieces and nocturnes, each of them memorable in their own right, adding up to an absorbing portrait of a young pianist-composer with Romantic-era Europe at his feet.
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