Luigi Dallapiccola: Liriche Greche · Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi · Piccola Musica Notturna (1988)

The theme of human liberty and subjection is a recurrent theme of both Dallapiccola’s life and music. Dallapiccola’s early works show him grappling with a range of disparate influences ranging from Debussy to Schoenberg. By 1934, as an appointed professor of piano at the Florence Conservatory, his compositions further developed under the influences of Busoni, Schoenberg and, especially, Berg, as Dallapiccola studied the 12-note system and began to incorporate it into his own music. Meanwhile, the growing shadow of Fascism reawakened his concern with the plight of ordinary human beings living under despotism. In 1938, Mussolini’s adoption of Hitler’s racial policies (with the consequent threat to Dallapiccola’s own wife, who was Jewish) provided the impetus for the first of his tryptych of works concerned with imprisonment and freedom, the Canti di prigionia (“Songs of Imprisonment”)―as Dallapiccola noted in his diary: “In a totalitarian regime, the individual is powerless. Only by means of music would I be able to express my anger.” For all his personal difficulties, however, the years immediately before and during World War II were musically fecund ones, as Dallapiccola established the lyrical version of 12-note music―with a distinctly Italian turn of phrase―that was to serve him for the remainder of his career, and which he first expounded in the sequence of small-scale vocal works, most notably the Liriche greche, written during the 1940s.

Tracklist

Liriche Greche
for voice & chamber ensemble

1. Cinque frammenti di Saffo
2. Due liriche di Anacreonte
3. Sex carmina Alcaei

Divertimento in Quattro Esercizi
for soprano & quintet

4. Introduzione
5. Arietta
6. Bourree
7. Siciliana

8. Piccola musica notturna
for orchestra or chamber ensemble


Jane Manning, soprano
Australian Ensemble
Graham Hair, conductor

Entr'acte ESCD 6504