Physical Release: 17 July 2026
Digital Release: 24 July 2026
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Nocturnes and Serenades
When I play Respighi’s Intermezzo-Serenata, I often feel cradled by gentle, dreamlike thoughts, scarcely more than whispers, like a swing set in motion by a breath of cool, fragrant air in the familiar stillness of an evening in the Italian countryside.
This opening image seems to me to capture the quiet atmosphere of evening and night-time hours, those privileged moments that invite reflection and inspire pieces such as the nocturnes and serenades gathered on this album. They are pages shaped by intimacy and introspection, by delicacy, elegance and a refined sense of sonority. Through them the musician’s inner life opens and allows emotion to become audible, and it is precisely this manner of expression that I feel to be closest to my own sensibility. It is a language that does not raise its voice or proclaim itself in order to command attention; even in its darkest or most tense moments it deepens pathos without ever declaiming its drama in an ostentatious way. The modern piano nocturne was cultivated above all by composers such as John Field and Chopin, yet its cantabile impulse owes a great deal to the Italian vocal tradition from which it draws so much of its lyricism.
With its delicate and poetic character, the nocturne brings some of the most deeply felt expressions of a dreaming sensibility into relief. Precisely because it is not confined to a single rigid formal scheme, it leaves broad freedom to the composer’s inspiration, so that the musical idea may unfold spontaneously and without the weight of external formal constraint, following instead emotions and states of mind that dwell in the most private part of the self and reveal themselves to the listener in suggestive and often poignant sound-images.
Composers such as Giuseppe Martucci, Giovanni Sgambati and, to a lesser extent, Ottorino Respighi have often been neglected or insufficiently considered. Yet this does not mean that their music is undeserving of recognition. Its value may be appreciated both historically and culturally—since it formed part of Italy’s instrumental reawakening within a musical landscape long dominated by opera—and aesthetically, in the beauty, grace and melodic eloquence of the themes and feelings it conveys.
In reading the lives of Martucci and Sgambati, and the testimony of their contemporaries, I came to realise that, besides being distinguished composers and performers, they also played an important role as teachers, contributing to a widening of the musical and cultural horizons of their time.
On what seems to me the fundamental question of the performer’s role, I should like to stress the importance of musical ideas that do not always speak entirely for themselves, because at times they are only lightly sketched or appear in fragmentary form. Such writing prompts the musician to reflect on how to offer a persuasive performance for a modern audience, and therefore on which interpretative strategies may speak most convincingly to the historical moment in which we live. I believe, then, that the performer must first understand the music in its deepest sense and make it inwardly his or her own, so as to bring it back to life and enable those who hear it—perhaps for the first time—to understand and appreciate it in turn. Through my interpretative choices, I have tried to convey at the piano the emotions, sensations and humanity with which this music is so richly endowed, and of which we still stand in need today, if we are to rediscover, both personally and collectively, the beauty of those small things that soothe the soul like words bearing harmony, beauty and hope. In this spirit, to borrow a phrase attributed to Perracchio, good music belongs to no single time: yesterday’s music is still music for today; nor does it belong to one country alone, for it belongs to everyone.
Ottorino Respighi (Bologna, 1879 – Rome, 1936)
Famous above all for his Roman Trilogy, formed by Fountains of Rome, Pines of Rome and Roman Festivals, Respighi drew on popular, natural and architectural suggestions with melodic spontaneity and elegance. His music is distinguished by refined timbral blends, swift evocative touches and delicate colourings that confer a strongly pictorial value upon his language. One may at times hear, among other strands, a kind of lyrical impressionism shaped in part by the French world, without forgetting that Respighi’s style was in truth an eclectic one, nourished by French, Russian and German influences alike.
The way he develops his compositions reveals a remarkable ability to draw the greatest possible expressive yield even from the most modest thematic cells.
I particularly admire certain suggestive effects of liquid, transparent and almost weightless sonority, in which Respighi is a true master. His search for colour as a personal and evocative language creates rarefied, dreamlike atmospheres that awaken gentle memories.
Giovanni Sgambati (Rome, 1841 – 1914)
Endowed with extraordinary virtuosity, he studied with Liszt, who in a remark often repeated in later literature is said to have observed that ‘Sgambati begins where many others do not even finish’.
He was widely admired not only for his virtuosity but for the seriousness and distinction of his musicianship. The significance of Sgambati the pianist lies above all here: he used technique not as a form of acrobatics for its own sake, but as a means of introducing audiences to the noblest and most elevated works of art, becoming an excellent and austere interpreter in the service of a high ideal of beauty.
Sgambati is a meditative and controlled composer. His nocturnes mark moments of cautious emotional surrender or inward recollection, rendered in clear lines and precise structures through the spontaneity of Italian expression.
His artistic life may be considered under three mutually complementary aspects: pianist, composer and teacher. In each of them one finds what seems to me his fundamental quality: nobility and distinction of feeling, exquisite taste, and a love for the most elevated and austere musical forms.
Giuseppe Martucci (Capua, 1856 – Naples, 1909)
In his creative work one senses the influence of German Romantic composers, yet also an alert awareness of the Italian keyboard tradition, especially that of eighteenth-century Naples. One may observe a tendency towards harmonic fullness and contrapuntal complexity; yet the prevailing inner disposition—particularly in the solo piano pieces—is that of a spirit absorbed in an almost unknowing sweetness, in a kind of innocent unconsciousness, living a life made of imagination and dream, beneath which, nonetheless, a current of pain remains.
In the brief page of the Notturno, the listener is drawn into music that evokes, in refined and sometimes delicately shaded tones, the joys, uneases and anxieties of existence itself. One perceives something that goes straight to the heart: an unmistakably Italian cantabile quality in the musical ideas. The recurrent presence of intimate and pathetic motifs, voiced on a subdued expressive plane, suggests an adherence to small and ordinary things that calls to mind, in literary terms, the atmosphere of crepuscolarismo.
There is, too, a rounding off of the harsher and more angular sonorities through the filter of the Italian melodic tradition and through themes closer to popular culture. What emerges is a duality, or rather a fusion, between northern symphonic thought and a Latin, Mediterranean cantabile—restrained, delicate, and of a subdued beauty.
Maria Agnese Mason © 2026
Maria Agnese Mason
She graduated in Natural and Environmental Sciences from the University of Pisa (Tuscany, Italy) with top marks and honors, and at the same time she prepared the entrance exam for the piano course at the Conservatoire “Luigi Boccherini” in Lucca, where she began her studies under the guidance of Maestro Riccardo Peruzzi.
In 2020 she obtained the first level academic diploma in piano with top marks and
honors and in 2022 she obtained the II level academic diploma in piano with top marks and honors.
She participated in piano masterclasses held by leading pianists such as Anna Malikova, Dina Yoffe (during her studies in Lucca) and Beatrice Rana at the Avos Academy in Rome.
She has performed in concerts for many musical associations in Tuscany, playing for solo piano, and accompanying opera singers like in Puccinian postcards from the Giglio Theatre in Lucca “La Boheme” in 2020 and “La Rondine” in 2021.
In 2023 she also started the piano duo activity with a repertoire for 4-hand piano, obtaining various prizes in chamber music competitions.
Like soloist, she has been prize winner in national and international piano competitions.
In June 2024 she played during the first edition of the Festival Piano Estense in Ferrara, Italy.
From 2024, she likes to create and perform spectacular concerts with a combination of arts, like
“Butterfly games” with dance, narration and music by R. Schumann Papillons or “Sweet night, how many stars” with opera singers, with images on the theme of the sky and music from various G. Puccini works.
She loves also explore the connection beetwen music and nature creating her own harmonizations of birdsongs and her images inspired by poetic phrases, which connected various piano pieces.
Since 2022 she has started teaching piano at music schools and academy in Tuscany.
www.mariaagnesemason.it
Giovanni Sgambati: (b Rome, 28 May 1841; d Rome, 14 Dec 1914). Italian composer, pianist and conductor. He first played the piano in public at the age of six and soon afterwards began to compose. After the death of his father in 1849 he moved with the family to Trevi, where he continued his musical studies with Natalucci, a pupil of Zingarelli. In 1860 he returned to Rome, where he quickly made his mark as a pianist, studied counterpoint with Giovanni Aldega and in 1866 received the diploma di socio onorario of the Accademia di S Cecilia. Meanwhile, in 1862, he had met Liszt, who at once recognized his talent, seriousness and receptivity to the various types of non-operatic music then neglected in Italy. He became Liszt’s pupil and protégé, and the two remained close friends until the older man’s death. This friendship was decisive for Sgambati’s development, and in return he did much to promote Liszt’s music (along with that of other important foreign composers). In 1866–7 he introduced the Dante Symphony to Italy and conducted the première of the first part of Christus.
In 1869 Liszt took him to Germany, where he met Anton Rubinstein and first encountered the music of Wagner, whom he was to meet in 1876 in Rome. On that occasion Wagner was impressed by Sgambati’s two piano quintets and recommended them to Schott for publication. By then Sgambati had become internationally known as a pianist; he played in England in 1882 and 1891 and in many other countries. In 1881 he was offered a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory, which he refused. He evidently did not wish to uproot himself from Rome, where he had made lasting and important contributions to the city’s musical life. Notable among these was his founding (in collaboration with Ettore Pinelli) of the Liceo Musicale (later Conservatorio) di S Cecilia, linked to the much older Accademia. The Liceo began informally, as early as 1869, as a free school for poor piano students in Sgambati’s house; in 1877 it was put on an official basis, and he continued to teach there until his death.
Sgambati is of unquestionable historical importance as a leading figure in the late 19th-century resurgence of non-operatic music in Italy. Yet his works have endured far less well than those of his younger contemporary Martucci. He nevertheless had a fluent talent, and a movement such as the First Piano Quintet’s mercurial scherzo, which begins and ends in fast 5/8 time, shows that in his youth he was not without originality. Occasionally later pieces, too, reveal signs of independent thinking, as in the unexpectedly adventurous Prelude in the Suite op.16 (published as op.21), with its piquant, glittering dissonances. Nor was he without Italian characteristics, despite the influence of various foreign composers, from Mendelssohn, Chopin and Schumann to Liszt. Like Martucci’s, his music sometimes has a sunlit radiance reminiscent of Domenico Scarlatti (see, for instance, the Gigue published as op.23 no.6), and at other times there are reminders of Liszt’s consciously ‘Mediterranean’ side – the fifth Nocturne op.24 (op.31), with its languid cantabile melodies and its indolent diatonic dissonances, might almost be called a ‘poor man’s Sonetto di Petrarca’.
Even in compositions such as these, however, the danger of lapsing into facile, easy-going charm, with repetitive rhythms and figurations, is not altogether overcome, and such dangers weigh heavily on many other pieces. Moreover, Sgambati’s larger instrumental works (with the possible exceptions of the early quintets) do not indicate that he needed large abstract musical forms to embody his ideas. The D minor Symphony is more satisfactory than the Piano Concerto precisely because it is lighter and less pretentious. Even the once internationally popular String Quartet in C minor is too rhapsodic, and at times too turgid, to convince as a whole. Nevertheless, for all their shortcomings, these works played an essential part in preparing the ground for more durable Italian instrumental music; and special mention should be made of the Requiem, repeatedly used at Italian royal funerals, whose sober dignity and manifest sincerity can still impress, despite the extreme conservatism of the style.
Giuseppe Martucci: (b Capua, 6 Jan 1856; d Naples, 1 June 1909). Italian composer, pianist and conductor. He was the most important non-operatic composer in late 19th-century Italy and played a versatile, highly influential part in the resurgence of Italian concert life after a period when it had been at a low ebb.
Ottorino Respighi (b Bologna, 9 July 1879; d Rome, 18 April 1936). Italian composer. Despite the eclecticism and uneven quality of his output as a whole, the colourful inventiveness of his most successful works has won them an international popularity unmatched by any other Italian composer since Puccini.
13.75€
Physical and Release: 17 July 2026
Physical and Release: 17 July 2026
Physical Release: 17 July 2026 Digital Release: 14 July 2026
