Piano Trios

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 traditions, 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 and string quartets and piano quartets of Sgambati. 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 album forms an engaging introduction to the impassioned idiom, too little known, of a significant figure in fin-de-siecle Italian music.