Ildebrando Pizzetti’s songs have fallen into near-obscurity of late, so this recital, released to mark the 50th anniversary of his death and forming the third instalment of Emma Abbate’s survey of 20th-century Italian vocal music, is an important addition to his discography. He remains a difficult figure for many, partly because of the often uncompromising austerity of his style, and partly because of his association with the Italian far right, about which we could do with greater biographical information than we currently possess. He was, however, a composer of considerable stature: you can’t easily overlook the best of his work, which has remarkable force.

Abbate and mezzo Hanna Hipp give us 17 of his 31 liriche (he used the term as the Italian equivalent of Lieder or mélodies), composed between 1903 and 1956. Anyone acquainted with Pizzetti’s best-known work, the 1958 opera Assasinio nella cattedrale, will find themselves in familiar territory with regard to his rather lofty textual approach. He was finicky as to what he set, preferring poets he considered major writers, whether ancient or modern, though it is hard, on occasion, to share his enthusiasm for some of his contemporaries. Debussy’s influence is apparent in his fondness for melodic lines derived from speech patterns, rising and falling syllabically as time signatures shift continuously, a compositional method heard most strikingly in ‘I pastori’ from the Cinque Liriche of 1916. Like many of his generation, however, he was drawn to early music: both plainchant and Monteverdian ariosi lurk behind the beautiful Due Canti d’amore and the ‘Antifona amatoria di Basiliola’, an excerpt from his incidental music for Gabriele D’Annunzio’s 1908 play La nave.

Many of the songs are notably bleak or stark in mood: Hipp and Abbate deliver them with considerable intensity. Hipp’s gleaming sound and declamatory fire impress in the anguished ‘La madre al figlio lontano’ from the Cinque Liriche, in which a mother waits in vain for her absent son’s return. One admires her lyrical restraint in the sexually ambiguous ‘Paseggiata’, which closes the same set, and the suggestive, but sparing way she uses her chest register in ‘Scuote amore il mio cuore’, a turbulent yet ravishing setting of Sappho. Abbate, meanwhile, breathes life into piano-writing that is frequently sparse but in which every shift of rhythm or colour speaks volumes. The accompanying booklet prints texts and translations consecutively rather than side by side, which can be annoying. The main article, meanwhile, is excerpted, not always ideally, from A Singer’s Guide to the Songs of Ildebrando Pizzetti, a doctoral thesis by Mark Whatley, associate professor at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. You can however, download the full thesis as a PDF: it’s well worth reading it before you listen.