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Despite that musical styles of Italian origin dominated all of Western music in the two centuries between 1600 and 1800, beginning in 1800 history witnesses a gradual ghettoization of Italian music into opera. Although Respighi, Busoni, Malipiero, and others revived the notion of non-operatic Italian music at the beginning of the twentieth century, a composer born in the middle of the nineteenth was the first to buck this trend: Giuseppe Martucci. While there is hardly a music lover who has not had exposure to The Pines of Rome, outside Italy Martucci remains a rara avis, an acquired taste that hardly any non-Italians ever manage to acquire. In 1989, conductor and composer Francesco d'Avalos decided it was time for that notion to change and recorded Martucci's entire orchestral output on four ASV discs with the Philharmonia Orchestra. In 1990, ASV combined the four into a single set; this Brilliant Classics issue, Martucci: Complete Orchestral Works, is merely a repackaging of the ASV set at a considerably lower price point. That should make it attractive to those who would like to experiment with this literature, and there are ample reasons to do so. Brian Culverhouse, one of the top engineers of classical music in Britain who worked for EMI for more than three decades, produced these recordings; the orchestral sound is both vivid and realistic. D'Avalos' advocacy of these largely neglected works is admirable; he makes them sound as though they are familiar and accurately transmits the flavor of Martucci's orchestral scoring, which is by turns both rock solid and transparent.
Martucci's major orchestral works -- his two Piano concerti, two symphonies, and a lovely orchestral song cycle La canzone dei Ricordi -- are all included, though with the exception of the masterful Symphony No. 2 the listener may well find themselves gravitating to the shorter pieces in the set that brim with charm and inventiveness. Some may find themselves taking issue with d'Avalos' occasionally rather hard-nosed assessment of these pieces -- in his opinion the Colore Orientale, Op. 44/3, is 'above all, a genre piece,' but one can hear an obvious correspondence between it and similar efforts by Rimsky-Korsakov. In general, Martucci's orchestral music bears a much stronger kinship, and sense of purpose, with the Russian nationalists and Tchaikovsky than with German symphonists such as Brahms and Schumann who dominated the era. If the only acquaintance one might have with Italian romantic instrumental music is Puccini's Crisantemi, then Brilliant Classics' Martucci: Complete Orchestral Works would be about the next best step one could take.
-- Uncle Dave Lewis, AllMusic
Reviews of original releases on ASV:
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/martucci-complete-orchestral-music-vol-1
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/martucci-complete-orchestral-music-vol-2
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/martucci-complete-orchestral-music-vol-3
https://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/martucci-complete-orchestral-music-vol-4

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