A professor at the Tartini Conservatory in Trieste, Italian pianist Martina Frezzotti studied with Lazar Berman, and later with Elisso Virsaladze at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory of Moscow, where she earned her doctorate. She follows up her marvelous Piano Classics solo debut CD devoted to Fanny Mendelssohn’s music with a well-curated Amy Beach program that represents a wide scope of this composer’s creativity.
Frezzotti’s colorful, full-bodied sonority merges as one with the brooding and somber sound world of the opening selection Out of the Depths. In the large-scaled Variations on Balkan Themes, Frezzotti’s forthright pacing and assured grasp of virtuosic challenges like fast-moving thick chords and octave outbursts contrasts to the expansive, intimately-scaled trajectory set out in Joanne Polk’s recording. The pianist’s ability to fuse polyphonic astuteness and massive textures meets the Prelude and Fugue’s imposing test, and makes one wonder how she’d handle Franck’s stylistically similar Prelude, Chorale and Fugue. By contrast, she coaxes Canoeing’s melodic strands from the keyboard as if they are floating to the water’s surface.
While A Hermit Thrush at Eve also sports lovely murmuring nuance, I slightly prefer Polk’s gentler, more yielding left hand support. On the other hand, Frezzotti’s rounded phrasing and alluring half-tints in the Three Pieces Op. 128 and the Nocturne Op. 107 convince on their own terms. However, Beach’s transcription of Strauss’ Ständchen could use stronger and more three-dimensional melody/accompaniment or foreground/background differentiation.
I’m also surprised by Frezzotti’s perfunctory treatment of Dreaming. Her overly fast basic tempo causes the melodic line to splinter, as if being shoehorned to accommodate the triple meter accompaniment. As a result, the magical transitions and harmonic felicities go for nothing. By contrast, Alan Feinberg’s slower, freer, and more rhythmically internalized interpretation uniquely probes the music’s expressive potential. Still, excluding Ständchen and Dreaming, you get about an hour’s worth of Amy Beach at her best, performed with masterful authority.
