Gianneo Piano Works – Marinis, Cremaschi, Viani

Nobody outside Buenos Aires seems to remember Luis Gianneo, and that’s a shame that this Marco Polo pair goes some distance toward correcting.

Argentina’s musical mid-century belonged, in the history books anyway, to Ginastera. Gianneo got there first, and quietly. Born in 1897 to Italian immigrants, he absorbed the criollo rhythms of his native country the way Bartók absorbed the Magyar countryside: not by transcription, not by picture-postcard quotation, but by internalizing pulse and inflection until they became simply how he thought. You won’t find gauchos strumming guitars in this music. You will find a composer who has heard malambo and chacarera in his bones and lets that rhythm surface inside sonata forms borrowed from Paris and Vienna.

The Suite of 1933 announces the voice fully formed. It’s a young man’s piece, brash, glinting, full of syncopated jabs that recall Stravinsky’s percussive keyboard writing without ever sounding derivative. There’s a Bartókian tang to the harmony too, particularly in the way dissonance gets folded into otherwise diatonic textures, never quite resolving the way your ear expects. Alejandro Cremaschi plays it with evident relish, good rhythmic snap, though I’d have liked a shade more danger in the loudest climaxes, a willingness to let the piano bark.

The Sonatina, finished in Paris five years later, retreats from that brashness into something leaner. Neoclassicism was in the air everywhere by 1938, and Gianneo’s contribution is modest and beautifully proportioned. Nine minutes, no fat on it anywhere. Cremaschi again, unfussy, letting the counterpoint speak without underlining it.

Dora De Marinis takes the two big sonatas, and this is where the set earns its keep. The Piano Sonata No. 2, from 1943, is Gianneo working at full architectural scale: contrapuntal, muscular, its folk material worked through with a rigor that never curdles into academicism. He can be intricate without turning gray. De Marinis has the craft for the piece’s demands and, more importantly, the temperament. She doesn’t over-pedal the textures, keeps the inner voices audible even when the writing thickens.

The Piano Sonata No. 3 (1957) is the emotional center of gravity here, and rightly so. De Marinis has spoken of the death of Gianneo’s wife shadowing its composition, along with the political turbulence gripping Argentina in those years, Perón’s fall came in 1955, and the aftershocks were still being felt. Whatever the biographical truth, the music itself tells you something has changed. The harmonic language hardens. Textures thin out, then suddenly clot. There’s an austerity here the earlier works simply don’t have, a paring back toward something starker. You can hear him inching toward the more economical late style Gianneo would pursue until his death in 1968. De Marinis plays it with real gravity, unhurried in the slow music, willing to let silences register.

The “Improvisación” of 1948 is the disc’s small miracle. An ABA structure, gently rocking outer sections cradling a more turbulent center, over in under seven minutes and gone before you’ve had your fill. It should be programmed as an encore by pianists everywhere. It won’t be, of course. That’s the story of Gianneo’s whole career in miniature.

Sound is clean, close-miked, a little dry in the bass, Marco Polo’s house style of that era, not unpleasant, just not lush. There isn’t much competition on disc for any of this repertoire, which makes the set valuable almost by default. But the performances are good enough that default hardly matters. Anyone curious where Ginastera’s generation actually came from should start here.