Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) approached the piano with a sense of expressive freedom, avoiding the conventions of pure virtuosity and preferring a more intimate and reflective language. His piano pieces range from lyrical miniatures to more complex works, in which influences can be recognized from Italian early music to the modernity of Debussy, Casella, Stravinsky and Scriabin. Alessandro Riccardi has programmed a sequence of pieces written during the 1900s and 1910s. They evoke a creative laboratory, where harmonic experimentation and the search for new expressive forms intertwine with a deep respect for the past. From 1905, the 6 Morceaux represent the first expression of Malipiero's compositional personality, where modal influences intersect with late 19th-century trends. Published in 1910, the Tre danze antiche represent Malipiero the assiduous antiquarian, the reviver and transcriber of his 17th-century forebears such as Monteverdi and Gabrieli. The quartet of Preludi autunnali were composed in Venice in September 1914 and foreshadow a period of 'perpetual tragedy' in the composer's music caused by the outbreak of World War I. As Malipiero wrote in 1952: "Their melancholy is perhaps the effect of the war just begun and not yet felt." Those effects are further amplified in Maschere che passano from 1918, a 10-minute quintet of oblique sketches, presenting high contrasts: mysterious, violent, distant, Malipiero at his most late-Debussyan. In 1920 he then wrote a heartfelt homage to Debussy, followed by 'Three Homages', which undercut the solemnity of their title by being dedicated successively to a parrot, an elephant and 'an idiot'. Throughout the album, marking Alessandro Riccardi's debut on Piano Classics, the piano becomes an instrument for personal introspection and sonic exploration, while maintaining a strong connection to Italian tradition and, at the same time, looking into the future. - Gian Francesco Malipiero was an Italian composer whose piano works reflect his unique approach to musical expression, blending tradition and modernity. Known for rejecting the rigid structures of classical forms, Malipiero sought to evoke pure emotion and a sense of mystery in his music, often drawing on Italian folk traditions and Renaissance polyphony. His piano compositions are characterized by their lyrical qualities, rich textures, and distinctive harmonic language. - Malipiero's piano output includes several collections, each showing his innovative yet deeply Italian aesthetic. Among his notable works are the Preludi autunnali (Autumnal Preludes), a series of poetic and introspective pieces imbued with melancholic beauty. These works often feature modal harmonies and unexpected shifts in tonality, reflecting his quest to free music from the constraints of conventional Romanticism. - Other works on this new recording are the Maschere que passano, Omaggi, Six Morceaux, and 3 Danze Antiche. These pieces are deeply atmospheric, blending delicate, impressionistic passages with moments of stark drama. Malipiero's piano music often eschews virtuosic display in favor of expressive depth, demanding a nuanced and sensitive touch from the performer. - Alessandro Riccardi is one of the most remarkable young pianists of his generation. His CDs with works by Scriabin and Liszt received several 5-star reviews in the international press.

Classical Music

MALIPIERO: Symphonies Nos. 9 and 10 / Sinfonia dello Zodiaco

A huge journey of adventure - a very good place to start.

The Venetian-born Malipiero wrote eleven numbered symphonies as well as the ‘Sinfonia del Mare’ stretching from 1906 to 1969. It was the Marco Polo label that presented them to us originally in the mid-1990s. It’s good that Naxos have now re-issued them at budget price in the hope that more music-lovers will tackle these rarely heard works. This disc and the ones that will follow also act as a firm memorial to that most quick-learning and versatile conductor Antonio de Almeida who died suddenly whilst conducting in Pittsburgh in 1997.

Malipiero was an extraordinarily prolific composer and that may be part of the problem. Like Darius Milhaud, a similarly productive composer, he has been largely ignored. This seems to be on the grounds that there is so much to take in, with such a huge journey of adventure, that it might be best never to start. Well this disc is quite probably a very good place to start.

Malipiero is a composer of several styles and to a certain extent you can see them developing in these three works. It’s best to start with the ‘Sinfonia del Mare’ which is not much more than a student work - the composer was 24. It contains the seeds of what is going to happen in later years. I first heard this disc whilst sitting on a sun-lounger in glorious sunshine overlooking the Adriatic near Ravenna. The calmness and delicacy of the work’s opening matched the scene perfectly. So did the more troublesome and windy section which takes up its middle portion - the Adriatic can be a harsh taskmaster on sailing boats and can quixotically change its mood. All this is so superbly summed up in this arch-shaped work. I have returned to it quite a few times since then and with increasing pleasure. It should also be remembered, as John Waterhouse says in his very interesting booklet notes, that the composer had not yet been able to meet “the better known sea music of Debussy which had been completed only a few months before”. There are three Sinfonias dating from the first decade of the century. The previous one had been the ‘Sinfonia degli eroi’ of 1905. After that Malipiero only used the term ‘Symphony’.

The Third Symphony also offered much pleasure in its four movements based on and inspired by bellringers, especially those of St.Mark’s Venice at the end of the war. Here I must add that the orchestral playing of the Moscow Symphony Orchestra sometimes falls below international standard, especially in the sound of the brass when exposed and in the high string passages. One can mostly put this down to rushed rehearsal schedules and unfamiliarity with the repertoire. The Malipiero symphonies should nevertheless be looked at again and this time by a top-flight orchestra. Only then may full justice be done to them. Having said that the ‘Sinfonia del Mare’ comes off well as do parts of this work. The Andante second movement is particularly beautifully played.

Malipiero enjoys the cor anglais but it sounds a little too nasal here – at least for my taste. It’s nevertheless interesting that he often gives it rather oriental melodies which emphasize the augmented second interval. The Scherzo is placed third and is a very brief but rhythmically fascinating creation. The work ends in a Lento with its “slow, solemn tread and the most realistic bell-evocations of them all”. The closing epilogue comprises the “more fully-scored, affirmatively bell-like return of the second movement’s entire first section”. Apparently Ernst Ansermet who knew the composer well commented very astutely: “these symphonies are not thematic but motivic, that is to say Malipiero uses melodic motifs … which generate other melodic motifs … they reappear, but they do not carry the musical discourse - they are, rather, carried by it”. As you listen you realize the veracity of this remark. For example his use of progressive tonality where the composer often ends a movement in a key unrelated to the one in which it started.

The Fourth Symphony is a more serious affair, ending in a long Lento - the longest of its four movements. It also includes an almost Stravinskian Scherzo. The slow movement is said to be the most beautiful which the composer penned. This is not surprising really as it was written in memory of Natalie Koussevitzky. Her death also resulted in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Britten’s Peter Grimes, both works also dedicated to her memory. Perhaps one can also see this piece as a memorial to the war dead with its reflective ending featuring the cor anglais again.

As I have implied, I missed these symphonies first time around on Marco Polo, probably because of mediocre reviews. Despite the ordinariness of the orchestral playing and the somewhat boxy recording I am looking forward to the next disc in the series and to discovering more about a composer in whom the record industry has taken little interest.

-- Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International

This collection of piano pieces by Gian Francesco Malipiero (Venice, 1882 - Treviso, 1973) almost seems to take us along a winding Venetian canal as we move through the moods of a composer who made the contamination between art and life the cornerstone of his existence. As he himself wrote in a letter to the French musicologist Henry Pruni�res in summer 1924: "My work is the barometer of my life". From the extreme perspective of Bianchi e neri (1964), the last of his piano works, all the way back to the Poemetti lunari (1909-10), perhaps one of the first characteristic expressions of his style, Malipiero's music explores the evocative possibilities of free and concise forms. His proclivity for a laconic style leads him to repudiate thematic elaboration in favor of short musical panels; a rambling flow more than a narrative evolution, timbric quality over ornamental virtuosity. Gino Gorini, the first great interpreter of Malipierian pianism, has well grasped the paradoxical game of antithesis that is at the core of Malipiero's invention when he speaks of a "discontinuous continuity, an unregulated rule". The result, however, is an imaginative and coherent world, one of the most original and unique of the first half of the twentieth century in Italy.

Classical Music

The Quartetto Mitja and the Orchestra Nazionale Artes - directed by Andrea Vitiallo - her perform the first and the last of the quartets by Malipiero and the Sinfonia "degli archi", three fundamental works to understand how the recovery of the tradition is crucial in the aesthetics of the Italian historical twentieth century.

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.

This third volume of Malipiero' symphonies features the most widely played of all his Symphonies, the strikingly original Sixth from 1947. The adventurous, at times dissonant Fifth, with it's concertante part for two pianos, juxtaposes chamber and orchestra.

The Italian composer Gian Francesco Malipiero, despite considering the piano his ‘strange enemy’, created a highly individual body of works for the instrument, exploring its most beautiful sonorities. + These five contrasting early collections range from the deliberately archaic idiom of the Tre danze antiche to the quirky humor of the Cavalcate (‘Rides’ on a donkey, a camel and a fiery charger), via the resonating bell-sounds of Risonanze and the gentle autumnal melancholy of the Preludi autunnali. + The powerful Poemetti lunari, a struggle between a world of radiant beauty and forces bent on its destruction, are regarded as Malipiero’s first truly personal creation.

Three very varied works make up this latest disc in the Naxos series of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s orchestral works, including two world premiere recordings. Malipiero claimed, extremely improbably, to have created his Fantasie di ogni giorno – ‘Everyday Fantasies’ – simply by stringing together musical ideas he had scribbled down from day to day, ‘and it was not even necessary to change their order’. In the Passacaglie, by contrast, Malipiero deliberately set out to use far stricter structural devices, while Concerti, composed two decades earlier, is a highly imaginative and diverse suite of miniature concertos for different instrumental sections of the orchestra.

Gian Francesco Malipiero’s rediscovery of pre-19th Century music of Italy continues here with a selection of works inspired by Italian Baroque and Renaissance composers.

In the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist period, when the light of the end was still far off, Malipiero completed a long-awaited undertaking: an edition of the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi. Its last volume, the sixteenth, came out in 1942 at the height of the war. The edition contained the sacred production that the publisher Vincenti had assembled in the collection Messa a 4 voci et salmi (1650).

Quartetto Sincronie’s choice to include an arrangement of Monteverdi’s Mass, alternating the parts with Malipiero’s work, is yet another example of reinvention-creation that Malipiero would likely have appreciated. In the composers’ poetics, instruments are asked to sing as voices, and so the opposite—voices translated to instruments—is fitting. Philological rigor was, after all, foreign to Malipiero’s worldview. Instead, the composer spoke of his relationship with Monteverdi as a kind of psychic channeling: finding synchronicity within the synchrony of listening, which dissolves the distance of centuries. The Mass for Four Voices is thus split into parts throughout the record, but it remains possible to orient oneself. The cohesion is melodic: there’s a descending tetrachord G-F-E-D at the beginning of the Kyrie that returns in various guises (inverted, diminished, augmented), articulating the contrapuntal fabric of the different movements. The listener can thus follow this pathway, from the Gloria to the Agnus Dei, in a zigzag that turns Monteverdi the sacred “refrain” to Malipiero’s profane cycle of quartets.

The piano works on this CD date from different periods in Gian Francesco Malipiero’s creative life. From his unpublished juvenilia to the late Ricercar toccando, from the evocative Poemi asolani of 1916 to the disillusionment of the pieces written in the years following the First World War: a range of works that bear witness to the development of the composer’s conception of the piano miniature as a kind of intimate diary, between nostalgic impressions and aphoristic humour.