This album is a carefully curated collection of amazing Italian chamber music, for cello and piano, featuring timeless pieces by celebrated composers such as Leone Sinigaglia, Guido Alberto Fano, and Renzo Massarani (world premier). Degenerate music (German: Entartete Musik) was a label applied in the 1930s by the government of Nazi Germany to certain forms of music that it considered harmful or decadent. The Nazi government's concerns about degenerate music were a part of its larger and better-known campaign against degenerate art. In both cases, the government attempted to isolate, discredit, discourage, or ban the works.

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The three composers presented (Sinigaglia, Fano, Massarani) paid the price of living in a transitional historical moment. Like in a limbo between the "old" and the "new," between Romanticism - at the time entirely exhausted in the rest of Europe - and the first glimmers of a new musical language that would soon move towards deconstruction with the avant-gardes of the 20th century. Yet, the outcome of their work is worthy of historical and performance interest, and shows the necessity of rediscovering a significant portion of Italian music history. Certainly, their shared Jewish background and the consequent censorship of the racial laws from the early 1930s may have contributed to some extent to the oblivion that befell these names. However, a more thorough musicological analysis awaits to be conducted to examine the reasons for that historiographical void, in which that glimpse of Italian romanticism is lost, to suddenly transition to modernity.​

Federica Nardacci, musicologist