It is within this zone of shadow that Luigi Gaetano Gullì (Scilla, 1859 – Atlantic Ocean, 1918) is to be placed: a Calabrian pianist of Neapolitan training, admired in fin-de-siècle Rome and then almost entirely forgotten. Only one biographical fact truly bears on how this recording is to be understood: according to his biographer, before leaving Italy for a post in America Gullì destroyed much of his own output, judging it unworthy of the exalted ideal he held of art. Of a catalogue said to have been substantial, only a few printed pages survive, and it is precisely this remnant that Giosuè De Vincenti gathers here in a world-premiere recording for Da Vinci Classics. To bring it back, then, does not mean recovering a body of work, but recovering what of a body of work has survived the judgement of its own author — a gesture that lends this listening experience, from the very first, the character of a relic rather than a monument.

The programme brings together the two surviving printed piano collections — the Quattro pezzi per pianoforte of 1894 (Vier Klavierstücke, published by Breitkopf & Härtel) and the Sfumature, six album leaves — to which is added the concert waltz A te!. The bilingual titles already declare a precise horizon: that, as the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani itself notes, of the late-nineteenth-century fashion for the “de salon” and “de genre” piece in the Germanising tradition, with its Italian translation appended, almost an act of courtesy towards the home audience. It is the world of Schumann’s Albumblätter, though one may also think of Grieg’s Lyric Pieces — with whom Gullì had documented, direct contact through concert life — and behind the gait of the waltzes and the mazurka one glimpses, as almost always in this repertoire, the long shadow of Chopin.

The Quattro pezzi remain faithful to this chamber framework without ever seeming mannered. The Albumblatt has the withdrawn intimacy of its genre; the Im Walzertakt unfolds a waltz-time without any display; the Novelletta takes up the narrative miniature of Schumannian descent; the Valse brillante nods to the society waltz. These are pages that seek not effect but continuity of discourse; and in the playing De Vincenti’s touch turns soft, yet knows how to become incisive exactly where the writing demands it.

An exception, in ambition and breadth, is the concert waltz A te!: at nearly eight minutes it is the album’s most extended page and its most openly virtuosic, the one in which Gullì grants the piano a more public, extroverted manner. Yet even here eloquence never spills over into ostentation: a restraint of interpretation — of the performer even before the composer — that was granted him even by an observer as far from indulgent as Gabriele D’Annunzio, who, besides mentioning him in the musical columns of La Tribuna, transfigured his touch in a famous page of Il Piacere.

If A te! shows Gullì’s extroverted face, the Sfumature reveal his more inward side. The title itself is already a declaration of poetics: the pursuit of the half-tint, of gradation, of the unsaid. The six leaves — Dedica, Alla Mazurca, A Capriccio, Canto d’amore, Tarantella, Tempo di valzer — traverse the genres dear to the century with a naturalness that is never merely calligraphic. The mazurka looks inevitably to Chopin; the Canto d’amore lets a cantabile of clearly Italian temper surface within a writing of European taste; the Tarantella opens the collection’s only overtly Southern breach — a flash that, within the disc’s otherwise composed whole, resounds almost like a confidence. It is in these unassuming pages, rather than in the concert waltz, that the most authentic Gullì lies hidden.

And it is here that the recording takes on a significance exceeding antiquarian curiosity. To restore to the ear — and not to bibliography alone — pages such as these means hearing again a strand of Italian pianism that the operatic narrative has covered over: the cultivated, domestic strand of the salon miniature of Germanising stamp. Yet it would be a mistake to project Gullì towards a modernity that is not his: as Sergio Martinotti observed, his pianism remains anchored to a nineteenth-century tradition destined to fade in the first years of the new century, foreign to the innovations of Busoni and Casella. And in this fidelity, not in spite of it, lies his appeal.

Within this framework, Giosuè De Vincenti’s work takes on a value that goes beyond mere discographic exhumation. A pianist of international career and at the same time a musicologist — today a teacher at the “Torrefranca” Conservatory in Vibo Valentia and active in the rediscovery of Calabria’s musical heritage — De Vincenti approaches this repertoire with the scruple of one who knows its sources. His reading follows from this with rare coherence: the phrasing prefers slow persuasion to declaration, refusing any emphasis that would betray the confidential character of this music, and it avoids with equal care both the temptation of archaeology and that of forced modernisation. He proclaims no misunderstood genius: he simply lets the composer speak in his own voice, in the historical context that belongs to him.