The Italian Bruno Canino is best known as an interpreter of contemporary music, particularly in duet with his fellow pianist Antonio Ballista. In a pair of concerts at the Wigmore Hall this week Canino and some of his close colleagues, including Ballista, are providing a potted history of Italian music since the turn of the 20th century, from Busoni right up to a brand new work by a composer still in his 20s. It's a useful reminder of those figures who were active between the two world wars, after Puccini and before the avant-garde generation of Berio and Nono. The names may be familiar, but not much of their music.
The trouble is that it is hard to warm to much of this music, sometimes for extra-musical reasons (Alfred Casella, for instance, was an unabashed fascist) but more often because the style - parched neoclassicism or strangulated romanticism - is congenitally uninteresting. For all Canino's energy, Casella's two-piano Ricercari on the name of Bach from 1932 never seemed to get to the point, while the combined musicianship of Ballista, the violinist Gabriele Pieranunzi and cellist Giovanni Sollima couldn't make Giorgio Ghedini's Seven Ricercari for piano trio (1943) anything but terminally dull.
A pair of vocal works, with the excellent soprano Alda Caiello, were more engaging. Dallapiccola's 1948 songs on poems by Antonio Machado are a bejewelled set of miniatures, without a wasted note, while Malipiero's Dialogo No 3, for soprano and two pianos from 1956 was a real discovery - settings of a pair of medieval devotional poems that are uncomplicatedly direct in their lyricism and full of harmonic subtlety and delicate colours.
Then it was back to 1922, for Busoni's massive Fantasia Contrappuntistica, which was designed as a two-piano completion of Bach's Art of Fugue. Canino and Ballista showed that they have lost none of their almost telepathic understanding, or any of the verve that has always typified their performances, but trying to weld this rambling, 40-minute monster into a coherent and lucid musical argument proved beyond even their powers of persuasion.
Further concert in the Wigmore Hall tonight. Box office: 020-7935 2141.
