In this substantial recording, the award-winning young pianist Dario Bonuccelli leads us towards the discovery of the works of Giovanni Rinaldi (1840-1895), a discreet and precious figure in the Italian artistic panorama of the nineteenth century. The trait that chiefly defines Rinaldi’s personality, in addition to his composing exclusively for the piano, is the fact that his inspiration expressed itself invariably outside the established formal patterns: no sonatas, no themes with variations, no substantial “concert pieces”, but only short, strongly characterised pieces. Not even an authoritative friend such as Giulio Ricordi, who urged him to compose a sonata, managed to change his conviction that the music he was creating must be the most direct expression of an emotion, and was not to be conditioned by abstract principles. The mastery of Dario Bonuccelli in the interpretation of these small portraits mainly dedicated to nature, daily life, small emotions and simple feelings, brings us back to the discovery of an alternative cultural undergrowth that flourished in the shadow of the great European romanticism and the rampant nineteenth-century Italian melodrama.