Malipiero: Fantasie di ogni giorno, Passacaglie & Concerti

Three very varied works make up this latest disc in the Naxos series of Gian Francesco Malipiero’s orchestral works, including two world premiere recordings. Malipiero claimed, extremely improbably, to have created his Fantasie di ogni giorno – ‘Everyday Fantasies’ – simply by stringing together musical ideas he had scribbled down from day to day, ‘and it was not even necessary to change their order’. In the Passacaglie, by contrast, Malipiero deliberately set out to use far stricter structural devices, while Concerti, composed two decades earlier, is a highly imaginative and diverse suite of miniature concertos for different instrumental sections of the orchestra.