Roberto Prosseda

Roberto Prosseda – Mozart: Piano Sonatas Nos. 13-18 (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:08:08 minutes | 1,91 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music Italia srL.

Roberto Prosseda closes the Mozart sonatas series with not equal tuning. Is there really any need for yet another recording of Mozart’s sonatas? Is it still possible to say something new when playing these compositions while maintaining respect for the score and for the composer’s indications? If Mozart were alive today, would he prefer to perform his sonatas on a fortepiano of the time or on a modern piano?

These are questions to which it is not possible to give an unequivocal answer, but on which I have reflected a great deal, also profiting from the availability of the sources and of many recent philological studies. In the letter to his father cited earlier, written on 17 October 1777, Mozart declared his enthusiasm for a new Stein piano that he had tried out, which was provided with a rudimentary system for working the dampers (corresponding to the right pedal on modern instruments).

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Roberto Prosseda – Gounod: Piano Works (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:13:35 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Decca

Born in 1975, the Italian pianist Robert Prosseda is without equal when it comes to discovering rare works, like previously unseen pieces by Mendelssohn; or compositions for piano by Salieri, Rossini or Caetani. And here he is with Charles Gounod’s works for keyboards, after having exhumed the composer’s Concerto pour piano-pédalier et orchestre, which he first performed in concert in 2011.

Gounod’s music for keyboards makes up about fifty pages, or rather uneven importance. He wasn’t very interested in the piano, and many compositions are sketches or short pieces for his own use. For this album, Prosseda has selected the most substantial part of this corpus, with a charming Veneziana to open, followed by the equally famous Marche funèbre pour une marionnette in its excellent original version.

The six Romances sans paroles are a welcome discovery, as are the Préludes et fugueswhich served as preliminary studies for Bach’s Clavier bien tempéré and in which Gounod used “a clear writing for two voices, lifted by a chromatism that pushes the artist onward”, as Gérard Condé put it in his monumental biography of Gounod (Fayard). The Sonate pour piano à 4 mains (with Enrico Pompili) in a Schubertian style is a pleasant youthful work, probably written in 1839 at the age of 21, during his stay in Rome in the Villa Medici.  –  François Hudry

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Roberto Prosseda – Ennio Morricone: Piano Music (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:10:56 minutes | 998 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music Italia srL.

His Decca albums dedicated to Felix Mendelssohn, including the “Piano Concerto No. 3” with the Gewandhaus Orchestra and Riccardo Chailly, has won much acclaim in the press, including the CHOC from ‘’Le Monde de la Musique Classique’’, the Diapason d’Or and Chamber Music CD of the Month in the UK’s Classic FM magazine. In 2010, Deutsche Grammophon selected twelve recordings by Prosseda to add to the box set, “Classic Gold”. In 2014, Prosseda completed his 10-year project to record all of Mendelssohn’s piano works for Decca in 9 CDs.

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Roberto Prosseda – Petrassi: Complete Piano Works- Partita, Toccata, Invenzioni, Bagatella, Le Petit Chat (2000/2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:07:35 minutes | 1,00 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © fonè Records

Goffredo Petrassi’s interest in the piano goes back to his first approaches to music. He himself remembers the curiosity aroused by an old Viennese instrument dated 1826 – a contemporary therefore of Beethoven -which was in the house of an uncle at Zagarolo, the small town in the Roman countryside where the composer was born on 16 July 1904. After moving to Rome at the age of seven, Petrassi entered the Schola Cantorum of San Salvatore in Lauro. It is known that the experience of boy chorister, which followed the old tradition for training musicians for the papal chapels, represented a spiritual and musical deposit of the maximum importance for the future composer. The developments of these preliminaries were however still distant. His activity as chorister ended with the change of voice and Petrassi, coming from a family of modest economic means, started to work at the age of fifteen as assistant in a music shop. The shop was subsequently taken over by the HP-FabbricaItalianaPianoforti (Italian Piano Manufactury) of Turin whose managing director was Guido MaggiorinoGatti, a leading organizer and music critic in Italy at that time; the shop then moved to Corso Umberto, not far from the Conservatoire of Santa Cecilia. There the youngster had the opportunity, in his free time, to read scores and parts playing, self-taught, a piano of the firm. These efforts, applied in particular to the Deux Arabesques of Claude Debussy, attracted the attention of Alessandro Bustini – at that time professor of piano at the Conservatoire-who offered to give him lessons on Sundays gratis. Under the guidance of Bustini, Petrassi began to study piano fairly regularly, applying himself to the traditional literature of the instrument, from Bach’s Well-tempered Klavier to Chopin and Debussy. On the advice of Bustini, he started to study harmony with Vincenzo Di Donato in 1925, displaying a great talent for composition. His efforts were then directed towards entering the Conservatoire in the class of composition and, once an acceptable technical competence was reached, the piano was temporarily abandoned. The first compositions in the catalogue of Petrassi’s works date back to the “apprenticeship” period with Di Donato: Egloga and Partita, both for piano, were composed in 1926 and played by the pianist Letizia Franco at the Sala Sgambati in Rome on 28 November of the same year during a public test of Vincenzo Di Donato’s pupils. Egloga was never published and is today considered lost. Petrassi remembers adopting a musical scoring without bar-divisions, an ingenuous juvenile experiment influenced (according to him) by the reading of a piano piece by Federico Mompou, a twentieth-century stylistically Gallicized Catalan composer. The title of the composition, with its evocation of the classical-pastoral world, is proof of the literary interests of the young Petrassi and of his regard for the French cultural and musical tradition that was still alive in the Roman milieu, between the opposing forces of the followers of Ottorino Respighi, IldebrandoPizzetti and Alfredo Casella. Nor can a vague, perhaps unconscious, reference be excluded to the celebrated eclogue of Mallarme, L’Apres-midi d’un faun which inspired Debussy.

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Roberto Prosseda – Mozart: Complete Piano Variations (2023)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 02:35:53 minutes | 2,55 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Universal Music Italia srL.

Roberto Prosseda (born 1975) is an Italian classical pianist. Prosseda began composing for the piano at the age of four, and took his first private piano lessons at six. In 1985, he entered the Conservatorio Ottorino Respighi in Latina, where he studied piano with Anna Maria Martinelli, graduating in 1994. He went on to study with Alexander Lonquich, Boris Petrushansky and Franco Scala at the Accademia Pianistica “Incontri col Maestro” in Imola, and with Dmitri Bashkirov, Leon Fleisher, William Grant Naboré, Charles Rosen, Karl Ulrich Schnabel, Fou Ts’ong at the International Piano Foundation in Cadenabbia (Lake Como, Italy). Prosseda has won major prizes in several piano competitions, including the Umberto Micheli competition in Milan, the Franz Schubert competition in Dortmund, the Alessandro Casagrande competition in Terni, and the Mozart competition in Salzburg. Prosseda completed his PhD in Italian Literature from La Sapienza University in Rome. Prosseda and his wife, concert pianist Alessandra Ammara, perform as a piano duo.

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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-6 – Roberto Prosseda (2016)
FLAC (tracks) 24-bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:56:32 minutes | 1,85 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Master, Official Digital Download – Source: Q0buz | Front Cover| © Decca

Roberto Prosseda is a highly gifted pianist most closely associated with the lesser known piano works of Felix Mendelssohn. Indeed, his Mendelssohn series of recordings for Decca carries the words “rarities” and “discoveries” on the covers, and the repertory — the recently unearthed Piano Concerto in E minor (the so-called No. 3, reconstructed by Marcello Bufalini) and various solo works previously unrecorded — fully lives up to the claims. Prosseda has also ventured onto other fairly uncharted turf, recording the complete piano outputs of Goffredo Petrassi and Luigi Dallapiccola, the latter series earning five Diapason awards from the influential French musical magazine Diapason. Prosseda has appeared at some of the most prestigious concert venues across Europe and the U.S., including Carnegie Hall, the Berlin Philharmonie, and Wigmore Hall in London, sites where he introduced the Mendelssohn E minor Piano Concerto. Despite his devotion to the little known, Prosseda’s repertory is hardly limited to it: he plays an array of works by J.S. Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, Brahms, and many others. Prosseda is also a highly respected musicologist, a factor giving him an edge in excavating rarities by Mendelssohn and others, as well as editing problematic compositions. Prosseda’s recordings are available on the Decca and Naxos labels. Roberto Prosseda was born in Latina, Italy, in 1975. From 1994-1998 he studied at the Accademia Pianistica in Imola, where his most important teachers were Boris Petrushansky and Alexander Lonquich. He had subsequent training at the Cadenabbia, Italy-based International Piano Foundation under Leon Fleisher, Charles Rosen, Dmitri Bashkirov, and Karl Ulrich Schnabel. Prosseda won a string of piano competition prizes, including at the Franz Schubert Competition in Dortmund and the Salzburg-based W.A. Mozart Competition. In the early years of the new century, Prosseda began appearing regularly at major concert venues in Europe, Asia, and the Americas and was also active unveiling and championing many previously unknown piano works of Mendelssohn. In the 2007-2008 season Prosseda presented many of these discoveries and rarities on tour in Berlin, Leipzig, Milan, London, Toronto, the Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival (Finland), Ravenna Festival, Maggio Musicale Fiorentino, and other notable venues. Prosseda launched his acclaimed series of Mendelssohn piano works for Decca in 2006 with the album Mendelssohn Discoveries, which contained 13 previously unrecorded solo piano pieces. Among his later recordings is the 2009 Decca CD containing the Mendelssohn E minor Piano Concerto, with conductor Riccardo Chailly.

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