Every new or reissued Malipiero recording adds something to the portrait of what we are gradually beginning to recognise as a composer of fascinating complexity. Here the ‘something’, perhaps unexpectedly for a man who was notorious for his misanthropic touchiness, is his sheer likeability. You hear it most clearly in Vivaldiana, the slightest piece here, which hardly counts even as a transcription since Vivaldi’s notes are untouched: Malipiero has simply rescored them for a classical orchestra with woodwind and horns. But his homage is so touchingly affectionate and beautiful, even ‘scholarly’, that I would as soon hear these six movements in his version as in the original.
The two sets of Invenzioni, despite being originally written for a film about steel production, continually reflect Malipiero’s deep involvement, professional and temperamental, with Italy’s musical past; some passages from Il finto Arlecchino might almost be by Pergolesi or Benedetto Marcello. There is a gracious pastoral element, too, and where Malipiero really does seem to be evoking a steel foundry it is Stravinsky in his neoclassical vein that he most closely recalls. Yet even at its most modal and ‘nostalgic’, the abrupt juxtapositions of this music and its refusal to repeat itself or ‘develop’ betray a fundamentally modern sensibility, and Naxos were right to replace the view of the Doge’s Palace in Venice that embellished the original Marco Polo release with a characteristic piece of Boccioni’s futurism. Agreeable, very slightly laid-back performances; a clean and decent recording