Marinuzzi: Piano Duo Works – Colli and Rubini

Two Marinuzzis, one surname, and a family history so tangled that even the annotator for this disc seems to throw up his hands halfway through the booklet. Father Gino was a formidable presence at La Scala, sharing the podium there with Victor de Sabata and once persuading Puccini to let him lead the world premiere of La Rondine — no small trust, that. Son Gino, born in 1920, grew up in the old man’s shadow and eventually stepped out of it, ending his life as one of the more severe figures of the postwar Italian avant-garde. None of that severity is on display here. Instead: a young composer, still in his twenties, writing music of an almost defiant conservatism while the world around him was on fire. Literally, in his case. He spent time in a Nazi forced-labor camp during the years these pieces were taking shape.

That biographical detail matters more than the booklet lets on. You listen to the Partita for two pianos, composed in 1941, and you hear a young man taking refuge in Bach: the contrapuntal spinning-out, the terraced dynamics implied if not marked, the dance forms trotted out one after another like items on a checklist. But two modern pianos are not a harpsichord and two manuals, and Marinuzzi the Younger seems to know it. The sonorities are thick, occasionally almost orchestral in their doubling, and there’s a curious tension between the neoclassical scaffolding and the sheer weight of tone the instrument wants to produce. The Sarabande is the piece’s real discovery — a movement of processional gravity that owes less to any eighteenth-century model than to Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin, its cool, hieratic surface hiding something more troubled underneath. Martina Colli and Rossella Rubini play it beautifully, unhurried, the voicing clean enough that you can hear the inner lines breathe.

The Divertimento of 1945 is slighter stuff: a set of variations on “Frère Jacques,” the same nursery tune Mahler turned into a funeral march (as “Bruder Martin”) in the third movement of his First Symphony. Mahler’s setting is sly, subversive, faintly grotesque; you sense him smirking behind the muted trumpet and the klezmer band that crashes in. Marinuzzi’s variations, four-handed at a single piano rather than spread across two, don’t smirk. They’re pleasant. They’re well-made. They do not, on repeated listening, particularly want to be heard again. A problem of material, not of craft. The composer’s contrapuntal fluency is never in doubt.

Which brings us to the real centerpiece, and the reason this disc earns its keep: the Lagerlieder of 1944, twenty-two minutes of music written, one has to assume, under conditions almost too grim to imagine. The title itself, “camp songs,” tells you where and why. There is nothing programmatic here, no obvious quotation of anguish, no easy signifiers of suffering translated into diminished sevenths. That restraint is what makes the piece affecting. It moves through its span with a kind of weary lyricism, phrases that begin confidently and then seem to lose the thread, only to pick it up a few bars later in a different key, as if memory itself were the subject rather than any explicit narrative. Colli and Rubini give it an admirably unsentimental reading: no wallowing, no underlining. I wanted, at moments, slightly more air between phrases, a touch more rhetorical space at the big cadential arrivals. But this is a minor complaint against playing that is otherwise scrupulously prepared and recorded with distinguished presence. You can hear the pedaling, the slight differentiation of touch between the two performers, the room itself.

Is any of this essential listening, in the way that a lost cache of early Britten or unpublished Poulenc might be? No. But it fills in a corner of the map that would otherwise remain blank, and it does so with real musicianship rather than archival duty. Given how little of either Marinuzzi’s music circulates — the father remembered, if at all, for the Wagnerian excesses of his verismo opera Jacquerie, the son for a modernist period represented nowhere else on disc — this release earns its place by default as much as by merit. Recommended, with the reservation that curiosity, not connoisseurship, is the likeliest reason you will reach for it twice.