Luigi Perrachio: Quintetto for Piano, 2 Violins, Viola and Cello (1919)

Composer(s)

Luigi Perrachio (b Turin, 28 May 1883; d Turin, 6 Sept 1966). Italian composer, pianist and writer on music. He studied the piano in his native city and later in Vienna, and also read law at Turin University. As a composer he was largely self-taught, though eventually (1913) he gained a diploma in composition as well as piano at the Liceo Musicale, Bologna. He taught the piano at the Turin Liceo Musicale (1925–40), and then composition in the same institution until 1955. A keen propagandist for contemporary music through his activities as conductor, pianist and writer, he also fought ardently for the reform of Italian musical education. Extreme modesty kept him from publishing more than a very little of his music: only a few piano works, songs and harp pieces were ever printed. Most of these derive in some way from the Debussy-Ravel tradition, sometimes with notable sensitivity. The Nove poemetti, for example, show an excellent command of a wide variety of Debussian techniques, ranging from the intricate, evanescent arabesques of no.4 (‘Libellule’) to the brooding, shadowy chord progressions of no.3 (‘La notte dei morti’, perhaps the finest of the set). The striking 25 Preludes (Perrachio’s best-known work) are more architectonic in conception, and sometimes show a truly modern toughness; yet here too Debussy and Ravel are rarely lost sight of for long. Perrachio’s unpublished large-scale compositions are sometimes even bolder harmonically: the opening of the Piano Concerto, marked aspro e rabbioso, is violent to the point of uncouthness. Neither in this nor in other unpublished works, however, do the manuscripts quite bear out the high claims made for Perrachio by some Italian writers.