Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata – Renato de Barbieri

Some names survive only as footnotes to bigger careers, and Renato de Barbieri’s is one of them — a pity, because on the evidence of this second IDIS installment he deserved better than the margins of history. Genoese by birth, Paganini’s city, and there is something apt in that: de Barbieri actually got his hands on the “Cannon” Guarneri del Gesù for a 1945 broadcast, an all-Paganini program that made him briefly famous across war-battered Europe. Imagine the nerve that took. Imagine, too, how quickly such fame evaporates once the broadcast ends and the decades pass.

He studied with Váša Příhoda — no small pedigree, that fiery Czech virtuoso who could toss off double-stops like confetti — and eventually inherited Příhoda’s teaching post at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, where de Barbieri stayed for twenty years before returning home to Genoa for three decades more. A teacher’s life, mostly. These 1956 recordings, filled out with two 1947 shellac sides, are about all that documents him properly on disc.

The big work here is the Kreutzer, and it’s a bracing, sometimes reckless traversal. De Barbieri attacks the first movement’s presto with real dramatic heat — you can practically hear the bow hair fraying — and there’s an idiomatic snap to his phrasing that suggests a violinist who has thought hard about rhetoric, not just notes. It doesn’t always run deep. The variations movement occasionally settles for a kind of easy, glossy pathos rather than Beethoven’s more astringent ambiguities, and next to Kreisler’s own visionary account, or Szigeti’s craggy wisdom, this reading can seem a little quick to please. But held up against contemporaries like Fuchs and Balsam, or Menuhin and Kentner in their more careless moments — de Barbieri comes off rather well. His partnership with pianist Tulio Macoggi is long-standing and it shows: they breathe together, argue together, land the sforzandi in the same instant.

The Saint-Saëns Introduction and Rondo capriccioso in A minor, op. 28 is the more curious document. This is French salon music that wants perfume, insinuation, a raised eyebrow — the sort of piece Ysaÿe’s students grew up steeped in. De Barbieri plays it clean, direct, almost businesslike. One slide, unmistakably Heifetz-derived, arrives like a quotation mark in an otherwise unaccented sentence. It’s not sensuous the way Thibaud made it sensuous, all rubato and suggestion, nor as richly colored as Francescatti’s, whose tone could suggest an entire spectrum of light through a prism. What de Barbieri offers instead is cosmopolitan poise — a violinist who has clearly played this piece a hundred times on tour and knows exactly where the difficulties lie and how to dispatch them without fuss.

Nováček’s Perpetuum mobile is a novelty, essentially a moto perpetuo showpiece with nowhere much to go, and de Barbieri resists the temptation — evident in lesser players — to turn it into a circus act. Alberto Cantù’s notes make the same point, rightly. Nothing flashy for its own sake. Just clean articulation, even bow distribution, a violinist keeping his engine running smoothly.

The two 1947 shellac leftovers are the disc’s most touching moments, oddly enough. “Schön Rosmarin” bounces along with real charm, pianist Giuseppe Guastalla providing the Viennese lilt Kreisler’s miniature requires — light hands, unforced tempo. “The Swan” is rarer currency on violin these days; cellists have annexed it so thoroughly that hearing it sung on gut and steel strings feels almost like eavesdropping on an earlier performing tradition, back when violinists routinely poached repertoire without apology. De Barbieri’s legato here is genuinely lovely — long-breathed, unhurried, a little old-fashioned in the best sense.

Sonically, this is a bare-bones affair. The transfers sound LP-derived rather than pulled from original masters, with rumble intruding on the Beethoven and some pre-echo here and there. The Kreisler 78 transfer is fine, but “The Swan” carries noticeable surface noise, presumably from having been played to death on some collector’s turntable decades ago. IDIS doesn’t do glamour, and doesn’t pretend to.

Fifty minutes total, no filler that redeems the short measure, and yet — this is a disc worth having. De Barbieri was a real violinist, unglamorous discography notwithstanding, and this modest release makes the case better than any liner note could.