Gian Francesco Malipiero - String Quartets (Orpheus String Quartet)

Information

Composer: Gian Francesco Malipiero

CD1

• String Quartet No. 1 "Rispetti e strambotti"
• String Quartet No. 2 "Stornelli e ballate"
• String Quartet No. 3 "Cantàri alla madrigalesca"
• String Quartet No. 4

CD2

• String Quartet No. 5 "dei capricci"
• String Quartet No. 6 "L'arca di Noè"
• String Quartet No. 7
• String Quartet No. 8 "per Elizabetta"

Orpheus String Quartet

    Charles-André Linale, violin

    Emilian Piedicuta, violin

    Emile Cantor, viola

    Laurentiu Sbarcea, cello

Date: 1991

Label: ASV

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Review

Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882–1973) was born in the same year as Stravinsky and outlived his great contemporary by more than two years. It was a long life, and Malipiero composed a remarkable amount of music. Compared to Stravinsky, he might be thought a minor figure. Yet these recordings present a strong case for remembering his compositions. Though never radical, the string quartets are never dull, and they display a consistent warmth of expression, and a welcome freedom from earnestness, without ever sinking to the level of mere salon music.

By 1920, the year of his First Quartet, Malipiero was a mature and confident artist, aware of recent developments but able to keep his distance from them. The music may call Janacek to mind, but it is a Janacek shorn of his fierce, almost anarchic passion. Malipiero's tendency to expansiveness can prove the enemy of spontaneity: there are times when the music rambles, pleasantly, but superficially. Taking the eight quartets as a whole, however, there is more than enough energy and fantasy to compensate for the occasional lapses into note-spinning.

Malipiero's way of organizing his quartets is also quite distinctive. Rather than adopting the generally-accepted view—that quartets should be in the symphonic mould—his are more like sequences of character pieces run together, with dance-like and song-like episodes held in balance. Nevertheless, the textures are often vigorously contrapuntal, and while darker moods rarely get the upper hand, the astringent harmony (with occasional mock-archaisms, and passages of soaring diatonicism that can even suggest similarities with the earlier Tippett) keeps mere blandness at bay.

The title that most obviously reflects Malipiero's light touch is that of No. 6—Noah's Ark—though it is the pleasure of the animals at being saved from the flood rather than farmyard noises that the music seems to represent. Other titles refer to matters of formal design: the popular poetic forms of No. 1, the Refrains and ballades of No. 2. If I had to choose just one work to represent Malipiero at his best I think it would be No. 7, where sheer force of emotion sweeps across the episodic boundaries. But even towards the end of his life, in the eighth Quartet, Malipiero did not wallow in nostalgia. Hints of Bartok and a passage of mock-academic fugato indicate that his aural imagination was as lively as ever.

The Orpheus Quartet play these capricious, well-shaped compositions with fluent technique and a commendable alertness to the music's many twists and turns. They are quite closely recorded, but the effect is never oppressive, and ASV are to be complimented on their enterprise in opening up another unduly neglected area of twentieth-century repertory.

— Arnold Whittall

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Gian Francesco Malipiero (18 March 1882 – 1 August 1973) was an Italian composer and music scholar. Educated in Vienna, Venice and Bologna, he was later influenced by modernist trends in Paris. A key figure in 20th-century Italian music alongside Alfredo Casella, Malipiero rejected verismo and revived interest in pre-Romantic Italian music. His major works include operas, symphonies, chamber music and cantatas. As a scholar, he edited the complete works of Monteverdi and contributed to editions of Vivaldi, Corelli and Frescobaldi, significantly shaping the modern understanding of early Italian music.

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