| Saturday, October 11, 2008
THE ITALIAN MAGAZINE AMADEUS GIVES A FIVE-STAR RATING TO THE SONATAS
This interpretation of Chopin is beautiful and perfectly arranged stylistically. It is not exaggerated where it is unnecessary, nor is it skimpy where the music requires the performer to fling himself into it heart and soul. And Pietro De Maria flings himself into it generously, demonstrating inequivocally the different scope of the Polish composer’s three Sonatas: the First in C minor, written when he was not yet eighteen, is “demonstrative” in its daring to possess the classical form; the Second in B flat minor with the very famous Funeral March, destroys the historical idea of the sonata and the Third in B minor is a pure experiment that regains from the inside, that is with subtle melodic-harmonic relationships among the movements, what the previous masterpiece had destroyed: the great rhetorical organization of the classical form.
Chronologically, the period of these compositions extends from the artist’s youth to his full maturity. That is from 1827/28 to 1844. Five years later, at the age of thirty nine, Chopin was to die of tuberculosis.
In terms of style, this triad is exactly what the interpreter gives us: the First a “promise”, somewhat exhibitionist, slightly amused, a bit academic; an excruciating roar of pain the Second, where the movements revolve around the theme of death exalted with colossal nihilism in the third movement which becomes an ineluctable gravitational center; and pure meditation the Third. Without premonitions of twentieth century style, debts to the bel canto tradition or anything else. Just Chopin.
Nicoletta Sguben, Amadeus, october 2008.