Martucci 170
The youth of a genius who went against the grain
2026 marks the 170th anniversary of Giuseppe Martucci’s birth. While music history celebrates his maturity and his monumental symphonies, there is a fascinating and little-explored gap: the years of his extraordinary youth as a pianist-composer.
This concert and recording project was created to fill that gap, celebrating the anniversary with the CD released in October 2025 on the Piano Classics label. Through the recording and live performance of his early piano works, the project explores the first steps of a genius who swam against the tide. In a nineteenth-century Italy almost entirely devoted to opera, the young Martucci fought a lonely battle for pure instrumental music. The concert is not just a listening journey, but a journey into the genetic code of a nonconformist composer who connected Italy to Europe.
The concert programme / The journey of the CD
The concert unfolds in three ideal stages that guide the listener through Martucci’s piano writing.
- 1
Opera imperat: the instrumental exception
Italy in the second half of the nineteenth century lived under the total “monopoly” of Verdi’s opera. Choosing to write and perform pure instrumental music in this historical context was not a stylistic preference but an act of cultural rebellion.
ProgrammeG. Martucci: 4 Pieces, Op. 31
- 2
The symphonic at the keyboard: the making of a conductor
Martucci would become one of the very first modern orchestral conductors in Italy, leading the historic Italian premiere of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Bologna in 1888. Yet this monumental orchestral vision did not come from nowhere: it is already fully contained, like a genetic code, in the density of his early piano works.
ProgrammeG. Martucci: Sonata in E major, Op. 34
- 3
Facing opera: Martucci / Verdi – La forza del destino
His synthesis with the Italian tradition lies not only in the lyricism inherent in his works, but also in his fascinating reworking of the Fantasia on Giuseppe Verdi’s “La forza del destino”. Here Martucci carries out a genuine intellectual and structural operation: he does not simply transcribe Verdi’s themes to please the audience but, in a purely Lisztian spirit, takes them apart and rebuilds them in the style of the great Hungarian composer.
It is Giuseppe Martucci’s very first opus: a deeply personal homage to one of the greatest opera composers in history from an emerging composer of the same nationality. A dazzling debut in which Italian opera meets Central European transcendental virtuosity. With this piece the young Martucci throws down an avant-garde challenge to his time: he takes Verdi’s theatre, sets it ablaze with Liszt’s technique, and shows the world that Italy too is finally ready to speak the universal language of great instrumental music.
ProgrammeG. Martucci: Fantasia on Verdi’s “La forza del destino”
Listen to the album
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Reviews
«…played with attractive lucidity by the excellent Ilaria Sinicropi».
MusicWeb International · Glyn Pursglove Read the review «Ilaria Sinicropi plays with the confidence, applying power or lyricism as required by the music».
Pizzicato · Norbert Tischer Read the review