Malipiero: Piano Music Vol. 1

Orvieto, Aldo

STR 37133

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 Prunières 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 favour 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.

CD x 1

Stradivarius

5.05.2020

8011570371331