There are composers who are forgotten not because their music was weak, but because history simply prefers different stories. Whoever thinks of nineteenth-century Italian music inevitably thinks of opera: of Verdi, of bel canto, of the Risorgimento that allowed itself to be accompanied so willingly by melodrama. Yet this is an image that music historiography has thoroughly nuanced over the past decades. Alongside the theaters, a rich instrumental culture flourished that manifested itself differently in Rome, Naples, Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Florence, sustained by conservatories, concert societies, and an increasingly tight European network. Giovanni Sgambati and Giuseppe Martucci remain the fixed reference points, with Busoni as the figure who subsequently took Italian piano culture even further into the world. But around them moved a much denser constellation of stars than the textbooks were long willing to acknowledge.
Luigi Gaetano Gulleć (1859 – died at sea, 1918) undeniably belongs to that circle. As the youngest of nine children, he studied at the Conservatorio di San Pietro a Majella in Naples, with Beniamino Cesi for piano and Lauro Rossi for composition, before eventually finding his way to Rome via Paris, in the circle of Tosti, Sgambati, and Mancinelli. What stands out in the accounts of him is not bravado, but rather its absence. Gabriele D'Annunzio, who heard him in 1888 in a program with Bach, Mozart, and Reinecke, praised precisely that refusal to chase applause through gratuitous show and even had him return later as a minor character in The Pleasure. A pianist who provides the novelist with his Roman soundscape: it says something about the esteem Gulleć enjoyed at the time. His later life – the Quintetto Gulleć, the friendship with Grieg, his directorship in Texas and Chicago, and ultimately that moving return journey to Italy that he would not complete – has something of a novel about it, but ultimately the music itself must convince.
And it does so on this CD, surprising and wholeheartedly. The four Piano Pieces, published in 1894 by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, show a composer drawn more to concentration than to rhetoric. Grand gestures are absent; what remains is a precise, sometimes almost restrained eloquence in which the Italian cantabile tradition effortlessly unites with Central European formal discipline. To You! – Concert Waltz (Chicago, 1915) follows the tradition of the concert waltz, but easily transcends the casualness of salon sentiment thanks to a brilliant pianistic idiom in which virtuosity always remains in service of melody. Yet the most enchanting moment of the recording for me is Sfumature – fogli d'album. Here Gulleć treats the piano as an instrument of subtle shadings: colors shift almost imperceptibly, phrases seem to grow organically from one another, and the music breathes a poetic intimacy that lingers long afterward.
Giosuè De Vincenti, who devoted his doctoral research in Évora to precisely this composer, plays with the authority of someone who knows his material through and through, but never with the detachment of the scholar. His touch is clear, his phrasing natural, and his tone remarkably refined. In Nuances , he preserves the fragile intimacy without becoming sentimental; in To You! , he lets the virtuosity sparkle without ever compromising the musical line. That balance – technical mastery entirely in service of style and expression – aligns wonderfully with Gulleć's own aesthetics. De Vincenti is therefore far more than a performer: he is the ideal advocate for this music and lets it speak with a naturalness as if it had never disappeared from the repertoire.
This recording casts a surprisingly refreshing light on Italian nineteenth-century piano music. This is melodically rich music, performed with effortless elegance by Giosuè De Vincenti, who proves himself a convincing guide through Gulleć's refined piano world. Those who think there is little left to discover after Martucci and Sgambati will find themselves not only politely but decidedly proven wrong here. One can at most wonder why this music had to wait so long for an interpretation of this caliber.
