Goffredo Petrassi lived to be ninety-eight years old, composing with undiminished seriousness across virtually the entire span of the twentieth century, and still the music world hasn’t quite figured out what to do with him. That’s a shame. Not an injustice exactly — the repertoire is crowded, and there are worse fates than occasional neglect — but a shame nonetheless, because the two works on this Chandos disc represent a composer of genuine power, someone who had internalized the lessons of his moment without being swallowed by them.
Both pieces come from Petrassi’s neoclassical phase. Which sounds like a dismissal. It isn’t.
Salmo IX, the earlier of the two, is cast for mixed chorus, string orchestra, brass, percussion, and — a characteristically astringent touch — two pianos. Petrassi was in his early thirties when he wrote it, and the music has that quality of fierce, slightly aggressive confidence you sometimes hear in a young composer who knows exactly what he wants and is not yet burdened by the need to seem original. The archaism here is deliberate, modal, almost liturgical in its severity. But there is nothing dusty about it. The choral writing drives forward with the kind of relentless rhythmic momentum that suggests Petrassi had been listening hard to Symphony of Psalms — Stravinsky’s neoclassical masterpiece of 1930, just a few years before — and had understood something essential about how to make sacred choral music feel physically urgent rather than piously inert. The brass punctuations are imperious. The two pianos function less as soloists than as percussion instruments with pitch, adding a bright, almost metallic sheen to the texture that keeps the music from sinking into mere solemnity.
And the climaxes — when they come — arrive with real weight.
Salmo IX in some ways anticipates what Petrassi would accomplish in Coro di Morti (1941), arguably his most uncompromising achievement from these years, that extraordinary setting of Leopardi for male chorus, brass, double basses, pianos, and percussion. Salmo IX doesn’t quite reach that level of concentrated bleakness, but it shares the same instinct: that devotional music can be hard, angular, even brutal without ceasing to be devotional.
The Magnificat, composed a few years later, is a larger, more varied canvas — soprano soloist, chorus, and full orchestra — and the Stravinsky fingerprints are again unmistakable. Petrassi himself cited Oedipus Rex as a point of reference, which is an odd choice given that the Magnificat is explicitly sacred where Oedipus Rex is anything but. The Symphony of Psalms feels like the more honest comparison, and there are moments in the choral writing where the parallel is almost uncomfortably close. But Petrassi is an Italian composer, and Italian composers — even the neoclassicists — tend to let feeling breathe in ways that Stravinsky’s chillier aesthetic resisted. The soprano part has an ardor to it, a lyric expansiveness, that Stravinsky would have filed down to nothing. It’s one of the ways this music reveals its true nationality.
Gianandrea Noseda and the forces of the Teatro Regio Torino bring considerable conviction to both scores. Noseda grew up in this tradition — literally and figuratively — and he conducts these pieces with an authority that comes not from studied objectivity but from something closer to identification. The choral singing is disciplined and alert, with good diction and a clean attack on those demanding brass-punctuated entries in the Salmo. Sabina Cvilak handles the soprano part in the Magnificat with intelligence if not quite distinctive personality; her voice is warm and well-focused, and she doesn’t oversell the lyric moments, which is the right instinct. The recorded sound is spacious and present, with the percussion and pianos well-placed in the Salmo‘s texture — you can hear the two-piano color doing its work without being pulled away from the choral lines.
A previous generation could seek out the old Fonit Cetra recordings on the Italia label, including a remarkable live rendition from 1962 conducted by Petrassi himself — Datum released it once, and it remains worth hunting for, if only to hear how the composer conceived his own tempos and balances. The Noseda disc doesn’t displace that document, but it isn’t trying to. It’s trying to make the case that this music belongs in the present tense.
It does. Petrassi deserves more than cult status, and this disc is a persuasive argument for that proposition — not because it oversells its subject, but because it trusts the music to make its own case. On this evidence, the music can.
