The Martucci case gets curiouser and curiouser with every recording of his music that emerges. The Second Symphony, regarded by Francesco d'Avalos as his most important work, is also the most elusive that I have yet heard. The problem, it seems to me, is that Martucci, in this work above all, was a fundamentally contrapuntal thinker, and one whose music is all development. His scherzo, an enormously clever and engaging piece, does not have the expected principal theme plus a 'second subject' or a contrasted idea in a trio section: it has a whole complex of mostly brief ideas which are seldom if ever heard singly. Plucked from the continual contrapuntal flux the thematic cells discussed in that movement would have kept Bruckner in scherzo material for years, but it is no part of their function to be isolated in that way, or for any idea to be so assertive that it can be heard as the theme, with everything else in some way subsidiary. To that extent Martucci's melodies do lack the sort of positive individuality that would identify them immediately as his and no one else's. I suspect that he really did think in terms of inextricably interwoven thematic groups, and his music as a consequence needs very close, even rigorous listening.
The process causes no pain; heard in crosssection, so to speak, his music sounds reassuringly mainstream-romantic. And he does reward the attentive listener (or console the baffled inattentive one) with beautiful textures (the very opening of the work, a Sibelian hushed murmur; the wonderful haunted, shadowed music for low strings towards the end of the slow movement) and with the occasional overt isolation of a long melodic line. But the need to be continually aware of background becoming foreground, to be as absorbed as Martucci obviously was with music as process (simultaneous process as often as not: three things happening at once and all three changing) does not make him an easy composer, grateful though his surfaces often are. Some listeners, inevitably, will find him needlessly complex and will be insufficiently rewarded by the fascination of his endlessly fertile combinatorial skill.
A turn-of-the-century Italian Bax? A late romantic Berwald? He is a similarly acquired taste, at all events (I am acquiring that taste rapidly). The B flat Andante is archetypal, densely developed Martucci, but with a long, plangently lyrical cello solo to hang on to and guide the ear; the very early Colore orientale is a colourful genre piece, a concert march with a somewhat Russian flavour to it. Excellent performances and recordings (the thickness of some of the climaxes is not d'Avalos's or ASV's fault).'