Petrassi: Divertimento, Partita, Coro di morti – La Vecchia

Some names never quite escape the shadow of their more famous contemporaries, and Goffredo Petrassi has spent seventy years standing a few paces behind Dallapiccola in most accounts of twentieth-century Italian music. Unfairly, I think. Dallapiccola gets the dissertations because he picked a system and never let go — the twelve tones, refined and refined again until his late scores glow like reliquaries. Petrassi was messier, more curious, willing to try things on and take them off again if they didn’t fit. That restlessness is what makes this disc worth your time.

Francesco La Vecchia has made something of a specialty of these Roman byways — the Casella discs, the Malipiero, now this — and I approach each new installment with the wariness of a man who has been burned before by “rediscovery” projects that rediscover, in the end, why the music was forgotten. Not here. The Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma plays with more polish than these scores probably received in their own decade, and La Vecchia has an evident affection for the idiom, that particular Roman blend of Stravinskian angularity and something warmer, more vocal, underneath.

The Divertimento in C major, written when Petrassi was barely out of the conservatory, sprawls a bit. You can hear a young composer trying on several coats at once: Casella’s brilliance, Stravinsky’s dry wit, a dash of Hindemith’s gearwork rhythm thrown in for good measure. It doesn’t quite know what it wants to be. Charming, though. There’s a lightness to the writing, an orchestral transparency, that suggests a composer already trusting his ear even before his craft has caught up.

The Partita is the real discovery, or rediscovery, or whatever term applies to a work that once mattered enormously and then simply stopped being played. Amsterdam, 1933, the ISCM festival, new music’s most important shop window at the time. The critic R.-Aloys Mooser walked out ready to call Petrassi one of the best of his generation. He wasn’t alone in that opinion, and hearing it now you understand why. The piece is tighter than the Divertimento, more athletic, less prone to wandering. Bartók has entered the picture — you feel it in the harmonic bite, in a certain nocturnal grain to the orchestration — and the central Ciaccona is the movement where Petrassi stops sounding like a gifted student and starts sounding like himself. Something obsessive and dark stirs under that repeating bass, tightening with each variation, and La Vecchia doesn’t rush it. He lets the tension accumulate the way a good chaconne demands.

Then the mood shifts entirely. The Quattro inni sacri, composed in 1942 for tenor, bass, and organ, orchestrated eight years later, after the war had rearranged everybody’s sense of what sacred music was even for, is a curious, ritualistic set. The two voices never appear together, which gives the whole thing an antiphonal, almost liturgical remove. Tenor Carlo Putelli takes “Jesu dulcis memoria” and “Te lucis ante terminum” with a plainness that suits the material, no operatic vibrato smeared over what wants to sound like chant. Davide Malvestio’s bass, arriving for “Lucis Creator optime” and the more expansive “Salvete Christi vulnera,” has the weight and grain the text needs. This is the emotional center of the cycle, and Malvestio doesn’t oversell it, which is a relief given how easily this repertoire tips into unearned solemnity.

I’ll admit the engineering does the singers no enormous favors. There’s a slight recessed quality to the vocal balance against the orchestra, as though the microphones were placed with the instrumentalists chiefly in mind. Minor complaint. The performances themselves have conviction.

Coro di morti closes the program, and it’s the darkest thing here by a distance, composed in 1940 and ‘41, with Europe already on fire, though Petrassi was never a programmatic composer in any crude sense. The Nuovo Coro Lirico Sinfonico Romano digs into the massed, chant-inflected choral writing with real weight, and the effect, rough-hewn in places, is oddly more moving for not being polished into blandness.

Is this essential listening? Not in the way Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero is essential. But it’s necessary listening if you want to understand how Italian music actually moved through the 1930s and ‘40s: not in a straight line toward serialism, but sideways, backward, through Stravinsky and Bartók and the ghosts of Palestrina, before Petrassi arrived, late and on his own terms, at something recognizably modern. La Vecchia makes the case patiently and well. Recommended, with enthusiasm tempered only by the reasonable expectation that you won’t play this disc as often as you’ll be glad you own it.