Roberto Loreggian - Lucchesi: Sonata per Organo (2013)

Andrea Luchesi, a moderately talented organ virtuoso on the evidence of the music on this disc, was one of a number of Italian musicians active in Germany during the second half of the eighteenth century. He worked in Cologne during Beethoven's youth and had slight connections with Haydn and Mozart. These facts are enough to allow annotator Giorgio Taboga to launch a full-scale broadside against "Austro-German musicology" for ignoring Luchesi's role and having "committed a mindful and unforgivable crime against music and the truth...," contending further that such scholarship "should be summoned before the tribunal of history to account for such wrong doing." It's all tosh, for the organ music heard here reveals no discernible influence on Beethoven or anybody else. They are short pieces, gathered from a variety of libraries (the famed U.S. repository in Washington is listed as the "Lybrary" of Congress, and there are other editing errors in the unfriendly booklet). All are short pieces, between one and four minutes long; the two multimovement sonatas are simply groupings of these. A primary source of Luchesi's style would seem to be Domenico Scarlatti, whose keyboard sonatas, like those heard here, can be performed on harpsichord or organ. Luchesi's sonatas and "diverimenti per organo" (there doesn't seem to be much of a generic distinction) are organized along the lines of Scarlatti's, with texture as the primary point of structural interest in binary and other generally simple forms. They are pleasant to hear but in no way remarkable. Certainly there are "Italian roots of musical Romanticism," as a Luchesi backer quoted in the notes here had it. But they are to be found on the operatic stage, not in the realm of keyboard music.