The eight string quartets that Malipiero wrote between 1920 and 1964 constitute a major body of Italian chamber music and reflect his successive musical affiliations. The first two form a linked unit and espouse his radical anti-Romanticism in the early 1920s. Nos. 3 and 4 share structural similarities and act as a kind of laboratory for his symphonies of the time. Quartet No. 5 was inspired by Malipiero’s theatrical work, whilst No. 6 explores a new-found narrative dimension. With the two late quartets Malipiero moves into a world of chromaticism, where tone-color freedom reaches the apex of imagination and achievement.

REVIEW:

Malipiero’s eight string quartets were composed over a period of 44 years and show a remarkably consonant stylistic development.

The First Quartet, composed in 1920 and showing the impressionist influence of Debussy and folk textures alike, is his most extended quartet at (here) 22 minutes. Its partition points are clear as are the ritornello figures. Malipiero’s way is not development, more successive panels of light, color or contrast but he ensures that the work ends with a reflection on the Italian baroque so close to his musical heart, cadences of almost ecclesiastical beauty and refinement. The Second Quartet is related to the First in several structurally important ways but is more compressed and in some ways even more lyrical. It generates real propulsion and sonority and this malleable movement alternates with light textures.

The athleticism of Malipiero’s conception is a distinguishing feature of the quartets; tightly constructed single-movement works that bring a heavy quotient of Venetian energy, myriad in effect, constantly referencing, briefly but adroitly, Italian Baroque and his rich folkloric storehouse. That’s certainly the procedure in String Quartet No.3 ‘Cantàri alla madrigalesca’ (1931) by which time impressionism has been lightly dispersed. A greater sense of fluidity and metrical flexibility enters with the Fourth Quartet of 1934. The occasional eruptive material seems more organic than in previous quartets where paragraphical points could impede and threaten to destabilize the music.

The wartime Fifth Quartet was written concurrently with an operatic project and here a greater sense of textural clarity infiltrates itself into the music. In part lyrically effusive this is an effective work that reflects cross-pollination of influence but also an increasing tightening of procedure, so that incidental elements are more clearly subsumed into the musical argument. No.6, though once again in a single movement, is in three ‘parts’, two Allegros surrounding a central quasi-improvised section which has catchy, playful elements.

The last two quartets show an increasing enthusiasm for chromaticism, and this means a moving away from the mid-period clarity established earlier in the cycle. If you welcome clotted textures and thickening of the quartet sonority, you’ll enjoy No.7 where livelier music includes a clarifying lyricism alongside that sense of effortful skirling dynamism. In 1964 he wrote his final quartet, the tautest yet, in which the material is foregrounded and saturated in chromaticism. The fugal elements that also motor the music are eloquent tribute to his command of the quartet medium and his skill in introducing disparate material without ever becoming academic.

Suitably, these recordings are played by the Quartetto di Venezia, city of Malipiero’s birth. They play with fulsome commitment and the booklet notes, reprised from that earlier appearance, will tell you all you need to know.

-- MusicWeb International

Five vividly contrasting works, four of them in world première recordings, make up this latest issue in the Naxos series of orchestral music by the Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero. Visions of heroism and death form the cornerstone of the release, in the Ditirambo tragico (Tragic Dithyramb) composed during the First World War, and in Malipiero’s two earliest surviving pieces, Dai sepolcri (From ‘Tombs’) and the Sinfonia degli eroi (Symphony of Heroes). They are heard alongside the deceptively relaxed charm of Armenia, based on traditional Armenian melodies, and the varied, pungently Stravinskian moods of the aptly titled Grottesco (Grotesque).