Gian Francesco Malipiero: Symphonies Nos. 1 “in quattro tempi, come le quattro stagioni” & 2 “elegiaca”, Sinfonie del silenzio e de la morte. Moscow Symphony Orchestra, Antonio de Almeida. Marco Polo 8.223603 (1993) barcode 4891030236035, (reissue 2016) barcode 730099360326
Reissue Naxos 8.570879 “The Symphonies • 2″ (2009) barcode 747313087976:
Recorded May-June 1993 at Mosfilm Studio, Moscow
Malipiero’s finest symphonies are still to come
Originally posted on Amazon.com, 1 January 2009
Oftentimes it just takes some patience.
When I originally wrote this review, this was the last instalment to come my way of Marco Polo and Antonio de Almeida’s valuable traversal of Malipiero’s complete symphonies. I had reviewed the four other discs comprising this remarkable series: Marco Polo 8.223602 Symphonies Nos. 3 “delle campane” & 4 “In Memoriam”, Sinfonia del mare (1993), Marco Polo 8.223696 Symphonies No. 5 “Concertante in Eco”, No. 6 “Degli Archi”, No. 8 “Symphonia Brevis”, No. 11 “Della Cornamuse” (1994), Marco Polo 8.223604 Symphony No. 7 “delle canzoni”, Sinfonia in un tempo, Sinfonia per Antigenida (1993) and Marco Polo 8.223697 Symphonies No. 9 “dell’ahimè”, No. 10 “Atropo”, Sinfonia dello Zodiaco (1994) (links will open new tabs to my reviews). Most seemed to have been discontinued by the publisher and some, including this one, had become rarity items. But, thanks to permanent searches on various websites and quick response when the float started rocking, I was able to snatch it at a reasonable price. Since then, though, Naxos reissued the complete series, cheap-priced (see last paragraph), and it seems even to have had the effect of bringing down the offer price on the marketplace of this original issue, so that’s good news for those interested.
That said, I don’t find his early symphonies as distinctive as the later ones.
In the fascinating and thoroughly informative liner notes, scholar and Malipiero friend John Waterhouse, the mastermind behind the whole Marco Polo project, points that Malipiero waited until 1933, when he was 51, to actually call one of his orchestral compositions “First Symphony”, having avoided the term and numbering through a defiance of the Austro-German model and its strictures. One of the most endearing aspects of Malipiero’s symphonies is their great freedom of style and architecture. Still, he had composed three early works which he did dub “Sinfonia”, although he didn’t number them: the “Sinfonia degli eroi” (Symphony of Heroes) from 1905, which he repudiated (although the manuscript exists, it has not been recorded on this Marco Polo cycle), the “Sinfonia del Mare” from a year later and the present “Sinfonie (plural) del silenzio e de la morte” (Symphonies of Silence and Death), written in 1909-10. Here the term “Symphony” must be understood in roughly the same sense that Stravinsky had in mind for his short “Symphony of Wind Instruments”, corresponding to the original meaning of the world: “sounding together”.
“Sinfonie del Silenzio e de la morte” has three movements – a collection of three individual Sinfonias rather than a cogently articulated whole: Danza tragica (the score bears a quote from Poe’s Mask of the Red Death), Sinfonia del silenzio (hushed, with an undercurrent of agitation, somewhere between Wagner’s Magic Fire Music and Debussy’s La Mer, with a middle section in the form of an “antique Dance”), and il molino della morte (the Mill of Death), a kind of Dance of Death with echoes of Dukas (Sorcerer’s Apprentice) and Mahler marches. The style is decidedly post-Romantic with whiffs of Debussy impressionism. Fans of the British late-Romantics (Bax, Brian and company) or Josef Suk/Franz Schmidt might find enjoyment here. But, despite nice and evocative touches of orchestration, it is not very distinctive.
So, Symphony No. 1 dates from the composer’s maturity. It is Malipiero’s “Four Seasons”: it is in four movements but these have little to do with the classical model. The symphony sort of developped on its own from Malipiero’s attempt to set to music poems from the cycle Le Stagioni (The Seasons) by Italian poet Anton Maria Lamberti. In the end, no words and no direct reference to Lamberti’s poetry, but the notion of four movements each evoking the mood and character of a season: first movement tender, lyrical and pastoral (e.g. woodwind-dominated) like spring, the second boisterous, romping and wild (and mildly dissonant) like summer, the third pensive, brooding and nostalgic like autumn (oftentimes raining Autumn is more boring than nostagic, but I guess the cliché has it that the spectacle of falling leaves will send one into meditation upon the passing of things), and the winter – oh, well, you name it: Malipiero’s winter is joyous and carefree, I guess he had snowballs and carnival in mind rather than the homeless dying of cold. But I find the music rather cliched and Malipiero doesn’t sound to me to have freed himself from his earlier late-Romantic influences. I hear nothing there as strikingly original as Malipiero’s later symphonies.
And the same is true with the Second Symphony, “elegiaca”, written three years later, in 1936. Although it bears no program other than its title, its mood and character are very much like the earlier Symphony: the first movement could be an addendum to the Summer music from Symphony No. 1 (lighthearted, forward-moving and dance-like but rhythmically rather square), likewise the sombre, brooding and elegiac second a second thought for the Autumn music, the scherzo-like, fleeting third for the Winter carnival and snowballs. Let me not press the point too far: I don’t know what season would fit with the finale, again elegiac and lyrical, evoking at times the kind of “prairie music” an epigone of Copland might have composed in the 1940s. Again I hear nothing here as distinctive as in the Symphonies Malipiero will start composing eight years from then.
Malipiero’s next Symphony – No.3, “delle campane” (the bells) – was composed in 1944/5, in a time of despair: the Germans had taken over Italy and the bells of Venice pealed in announcement of doom. As is often the case, the dire situation seems to have opened up new wells of sonic imagination in Malipiero. His true originality as a symphonist started there. This first volume in the series can be seen only as prehistory to a fine cycle. It is, just like it happened to me, the last one you need to acquire in the series.
There are listings online for what seems to be the same CD in its first, 1993 edition, under barcode 5011664839023. I don’t know what that is, not Marco Polo’s official barcodes (they reissued the CD in 2016, same label number different barcode, see heading), possibly a distributor’s barcode stickered at the back. As indicated, Naxos has reissued it, see heading, so compare for best price.