This is the third volume (though the last of the four to appear) of Francesco d'Avalos's complete survey of Martucci's orchestral music, but it is also by way of being an appendix to it. There is no question that the gentle yet haunting song-cycle La canzone dei ricordi deserves a high place in his slender output: its quiet poetry and freshly appealing melody, its exquisite word-setting (one understands why Martucci, leading Italian music desperately late into the symphonic tradition, foreswore opera but oh! what refinement he could have brought to it) and its alert yet quite unslavish awareness of all that had been happening North of the Alps give it a very special place in the history of Italian music and a very particular flavour of its own: subtle, clean and compulsively attractive.
In the days before d'Avalos and one or two others began rediscovering Martucci, a piano concerto of his had a sort of ghostly existence, printed in almost invisible ink on the pages of musical history, since a number of major pianists had taken it into their repertoires for a while. This is not that concerto, but its until recently unpublished, unperformed and unknown predecessor, written when Martucci was a mere 22. For a youthful work by a composer from a country which had no tradition of concert-giving (and no recent tradition of concerto-writing) it is a remarkably assured piece, and on an impressively large scale. Much of it is derivative, of course, notably its flamboyantly virtuoso solo writing, and it would be interesting to know whether it was Martucci's recognition of this, or simple lack of opportunity to perform it, which led him to put the work aside.
Wisdom after the event, though, is a pleasure in itself, and anyone who has got to know Martucci's symphonies and what we must now call his 'Second' Piano Concerto will enjoy spotting prefigurings of his mature style. They are certainly there: a budding fondness for scalic figures, an already developing gift for taking a plainishseeming idea and then demonstrating with beautiful instrumental colouring that it is no such thing (try the slow movement with its lovely coda) and an adventurous harmonic hint or two. Plus, it must be admitted, a deal of padding and of the young Martucci following in the obvious footsteps for anyone writing a piano concerto in 1878 (early-ish as well as late-ish romantic footsteps) while waiting for his own path to open up.
Caramiello plays it with vivid virtuosity, backed by rather heavy-featured direction from d'Avalos and an amply rich recording. The only disadvantage to Yakar's sensitive reading of the Canzone is a very slightly less than idiomatic use of Italian.'