Petrassi: Magnificat and Salmo IX – Noseda

Chandos has taken on a composer most American listeners know, if they know him at all, through a single anthologized piece — maybe the Coro or one of those eight Concertos for Orchestra that occupied Petrassi from the 1930s clear through to the Nixon administration. This is a different Petrassi. Younger, less ironic, still finding out what an Italian composer born in 1904 was supposed to do with the wreckage of nineteenth-century opera behind him and Casella breathing down his neck.

The Magnificat dates from 1939–40, written while Europe caught fire. You would not necessarily know it from the music. There is a serenity here, even a kind of confidence, that seems out of step with the historical moment. Petrassi carves the text into thirteen sections, tossing the material between soprano and chorus with orchestral connective tissue in between, and the whole thing feels like a mosaic more than an arch. Stravinsky is in the room — those clipped, motoric rhythms in the opening pages could have wandered in from Les Noces — but so is Malipiero, all that Adriatic sunlight filtered through contrapuntal lines that never quite resolve where you expect. And then, unexpectedly, Palestrina. Petrassi sang in the choir of San Salvatore in Lauro as a boy, absorbed all that sixteenth-century polyphony into his bones, and claimed later that he’d forgotten it entirely. Track 8, “et sanctum nomen ejus,” gives the lie to that. You can practically smell the incense.

The fugue at “Sicut locutus est” is the structural crux of the piece, and it’s a real fugue, tightly wound and cumulative, building to a peak of contrapuntal density that leaves the ensuing Gloria sounding almost apologetic. I don’t think that’s a flaw in the reading. I think it’s a flaw, or at least a miscalculation, in the piece itself. Petrassi, not yet forty, hadn’t quite worked out how to come down off a climax gracefully. He’d solve that problem magnificently in later decades. Here the music just exhales and stops, and you’re left checking the track listing to make sure it’s actually over.

Sabina Cvilak sings the soprano solos with a plush, rounded tone that is lovely to listen to in the abstract and wrong, I think, for this repertoire. Petrassi wanted a soprano leggero — something bright, agile, boy-treble in its purity — and what we get instead is essentially a lyric mezzo pushed uphill. The top notes cost her something audible. The coloratura passages thicken rather than sparkle. Consonants disappear. It’s not a disaster, but it is a mismatch, the kind where you spend the whole performance imagining a different, lighter voice laid over the same orchestral track. The chorus of the Teatro Regio Torino, prepared by Claudio Fenoglio, sings with clean intonation and not quite enough fire. Correct rather than committed.

The Salmo IX is the more absorbing piece, and the performance knows it. Composed 1934–36, scored for that wonderfully odd Petrassian conglomerate of strings, brass, two pianos, and percussion — no woodwinds at all, which gives the sonority a granite hardness quite unlike the Magnificat‘s more conventional palette — this is music with teeth. Noseda and the Regio orchestra dig into the brass writing with real relish. The two pianos function almost as an extended percussion battery, hammering out ostinati that anticipate the mature Petrassi of the Concerto for Orchestra decades later. Chorus and orchestra alike sound like they mean it here. The blazing climaxes in the second part have genuine menace, an almost Varèse-like brutality that nothing in the Magnificat prepares you for.

Is there competition? Not really, not on disc. This repertoire has been catnip for musicologists and virtually invisible to record collectors, which is precisely why Chandos deserves credit for the undertaking even where the results are mixed. Enzo Restagno’s booklet essay is genuinely distinguished, better annotated than most of what crosses my desk. Noseda conducts with evident conviction throughout, drawing playing of real character from an orchestra not always associated with this repertoire.

I’d call this a valuable disc rather than an indispensable one. The Salmo IX alone justifies acquiring it — fierce, strange, prophetic music, superbly played. The Magnificat is handsome but hampered by casting, and I kept wishing Chandos had found a genuine leggero for the solo lines. Recommended, with that reservation firmly on the table.