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Stories   >   The specter of menace, if not violence, looms over several offerings from Roberto Prosseda's 'War Silence' / the arts fuse

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The specter of menace, if not violence, looms over several offerings from Roberto Prosseda's 'War Silence' / the arts fuse

Posted: May 21, 2025

The Italian piano concerto is a genre largely absent from the standard repertoire. In War Silence, pianist Roberto Prosseda helps to remedy this neglect in a programme consisting of four rare Italian piano concertos. Written between 1900 and 2015, concertos by Guido Alberto Fano, Luigi Dallapiccola, Silvio Omizzolo and Cristian Carrara will be new to most listeners, and two are world premiere recordings. The London Philharmonic Orchestra is conducted by Nir Kabaretti.

From the late-Romantic Andante e Allegro con fuoco by Guido Alberto Fano and Dallapiccola’s early wartime concerto to the final, much later work by Cristian Carrara, this album provides a welcome overview of the piano concerto in 20th- and 21st-century Italy. All four works benefit from the playing of Roberto Prosseda, whose talents as a champion of Italian contemporary music and of undiscovered piano music make him the ideal advocate.


the arts fuse - Jonathan Blumhofer writes…..Nothing on War Silence, a survey of Italian concertos from pianist Roberto Prosseda, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and conductor Nir Kabaretti, sounds quite like what the name suggests—even though the album’s final installment is a piece that shares the title. But the specter of menace, if not violence, looms over several of these offerings, which span the early 20th century up to the present day.

The most recent installment, Cristian Carrara’s title track, offers a meditation on the years’-long conflict in Ukraine. Though its overarching mood is more reflective and hopeful than anticipated, the Pordenone native has crafted an engaging three-movement score, though one that might benefit from a bit more harmonic grit.

Be that as it may, Prosseda leans into the central section’s (“Solitude”) lyricism with a singer’s intuition, and his execution of the score’s more dramatic and urgent spots—like the finale’s opening toccata-like episodes—is nicely grounded.

In Silvio Omizzolo’s Concerto per pianoforte e orchestra, pianist and orchestra make cogent work of the music’s spiky, acerbic turns of phrase. This is the album’s most traditional number, with the piano and orchestra facing off in their usual antagonistic roles across its twenty-minute span. Here, too, no programs or extramusical impulses are anywhere in sight—though the work’s nervous energy and searching slow movement give it a decidedly modern sensibility.

Luigi Dallapiccola’s Piccolo Concerto doesn’t boast a program, either, though it originated in 1941 as a showpiece for the seven-year-old virtuoso Muriel Couvreaux. Not exactly a child’s piece—the composer didn’t stint on technical demands or soften his essentially chromatic (later, serialized) musical language—the concerto is, still, often bright and jaunty. Prosseda, Kabaretti, and the Philharmonic seem to take special pleasure in letting its moments of joy and naivete (like the “Girotondo” and “Ripresa” movements) shine.

The disc’s outlier is Guido Alberto Fano’s Andante e Allegro con fuoco, whose Straussian warmth and essential songfulness call to mind some of the composer’s contemporaries, especially Busoni. Though it doesn’t quite fit, stylistically, with the rest of the program, this is beautiful music—and, in the present context, a haunting reminder that, when it was written in 1900, nobody knew what horrors the new century held.

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