GIAN FRANCESCO MALIPIERO (1882-1973): Cavalcate, Poemetti lunari, Preludi autunnali, 3 danze antiche, Risonanze.

Description: Our second recent disc of Malipiero's piano music contains perhaps his largest work, the seven-piece cycle (lasting 34 minutes here) of 1909-10 "Little Lunar Poems", five of which are slow, borderline depressive and sometimes slightly sinister - an evocation of night as vaguely threatening (the title of the first piece was originally "The Monks with Empty Eye-Sockets". Cavalcate (1921) is oddly humorous in its depiction of riding a donkey, a camel and a fast horse but most of the other pieces contain what Malipiero scholar John C.G. Waterhouse called a struggle between "a world of radiant Beauty with melancholy undertones, and sombre, turbulent forces that seem bent on destroying that Beauty". Rira Lim (piano).