It's an unusual composer who writes two piano quintets but only one string quartet. It's an unusual Italian composer who writes chamber music at all, last century - especially if he writes absolutely no operas. It's a unique Italian composer who's taken on by a German publisher thanks to a recommendation from Wagner - and not a young, impressionable Wagner but a Grand Old Man fresh from the launch of his own opera house at Bayreuth in 1876. Greatly impressed by those quintets, Wagner even tried to persuade his Italian friend into opera - and failed. Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914) was certainly a man who knew his own mind.
Sgambati's fondness for the piano quintet signals that the piano was his own instrument. Indeed he was the finest Italian pianist of his day, not to mention a pupil and close friend of the best in Europe, Franz Liszt; he even shared Liszt's taste for extravagant hairstyles. So you might expect that, like that other Liszt-loving pianist- composer Ferruccio Busoni a generation later, Sgambati's German sympathies would have drawn him inexorably north of the Alps.
Far from it: Sgambati was born and died in Rome, and lived there practically all his life. His many concert tours, as far afield as England and Russia, convinced him that, as he put it, he could hardly bear to be out of sight of the dome of St Peter's. Sgambati's first orchestral piece, now sadly lost, was an overture (with solo piano, naturally) called Cola di Rienzo - the 14th century Roman who rose from the gutter to unite his city behind the dream of restoring ancient imperial glories, before over-reaching himself; a story which, ironically, Wagner had once made into the longest (and arguably most Italianate) opera he ever composed, Rienzi. Sgambati devoted himself to the regeneration of Roman musical life: he founded and directed chamber and orchestral concert series, conducting the Italian premières of Beethoven's Eroica and Seventh Symphonie and Liszt's Dante Symphony; the first music college in Rome grew out of free lessons he gave for poor young musicians.
So: a loyal Italian but with an affinity for Germanic music; add the facts that Sgambati's mother was English, and that he moved in highly cosmopolitan circles in Rome, and it's no surprise that music critics and historians find his compositions hard to pigeonhole. Italian commentators have often taken the easy way out, praising Sgambati's smaller piano pieces for their supposed "Italian" qualities (singing melodies) above his works in large-scale "Germanic" forms (with their emphasis on thematic and harmonic development); or even accusing him of denying his voice-inspired Italian heritage completely and selling his soul to those instrument-obsessed Germans.
In truth, Sgambati's music is a fascinating integration of these so-called "Italian" and "German" characteristics - a bogus division, in any case. In earlier ages the Italian Gabrielis and Scarlattis, Corelli and Vivaldi influenced Germans like Schütz, Handel and Bach, while Sgambati's own work freed the way for the generation of Italian composers born in the 1880s - Respighi, Pizzetti, Malipiero and Casella - to put instrumental music on an equal looting with opera, and for many others to adopt German ideas they admired while remaining true to their Italian roots -from Sgambati's younger contemporaries Martucci and Busoni to modern figures like Nono and Berio.
The two large-scale chamber works on the present disc - like the First Piano Quintet recorded on ASV CD DCA 1029 - epitomise Sgambati's transalpine musical union. Into these "German" forms he pours an effortless , flow of melody which would do honour to any Italian composer -or indeed (given a little more counterpoint) to the chamber music of an exact contemporary of Sgambati's who shared his ambiguous relationship to the Germanic tradition, the Czech Antonin Dvorak. Sgambati's continuous development of his themes, on the other hand, and some of his modulations, align him firmly with the "new German school": no wonder Wagner was so struck.
A still more radical idea launches the Second Piano Quintet in B flat, whose opening viola phrase rises to a flattened seventh, A flat, lending the first pages a modal tang a few decades ahead of its time (the 1870s). The first movements flexible sonata form embraces a wide range of moods: the initial appearance of one important and much-developed theme even suggests a café serenade. You might expect this "popular" style to underpin the following Barcarolle, and its 6/8 rocking rhythm effortlessly evokes the canals of Venice; but it’d be a rare gondolier who could create Sgambati's haunting main tune, unfurled by the piano alter the brief introduction, or the powerful, almost angry climax he builds from it. The relaxed central section makes colourful use of pizzicato and chromatic twists. Sgambati often introduces tunes on his own instrument, and most strikingly to launch the beautiful slow movement. Its echoes of Schubert's late style (Sgambati loved Schubert) blend with suggestions of an influence on two future masterpieces of Italian chamber music: the piano's parental role, the music's fusion of light and darkness, the textures, even the actual themes, all point forward 50 years to Ildebrando Pizzetti's Violin Sonata and Piano Trio, as well as his Piano Concerto Canti della stagione alta (Songs of the high season). Sgambati's vivacious finale cements two more of the Second Quintet's affinities, with Schumann and - to Anglo-Saxon ears - even a hint of Elgar.
Bereft of his beloved piano, Sgambati's String Quartet in C sharp minor of 1882 has, perhaps, less personality than the earlier quintets, but compensates with freer structures emphasising variety and immediate Italianate appeal - plus a few surprises. The witty, zippy textures of the concise second movement suddenly suggest they're about to launch a full-scale fugue, before playfully turning tail and spiralling off to a throwaway ending. The first and third movements are both attractively rhapsodic and songful, while the finale wields a fistful of vigorous tunes.
It's not hard to hear how Sgambati's String Quartet, with its grateful string writing, quickly became an international favourite, championed - not least in Britain - by the American Kneisel Quartet and (alongside the Second Quintet) by Joachim and Piatti. Which can only have served further to blind us to Sgambati’s genuinely Italian achievement!