Thursday, May 21, 2020

Sony’s Fromm Collection: Luigi Dallapiccola

Luigi Dallapiccola and Elisabeth Söderström on the original cover of the recording being discussed

The seventh CD in Sony Classical’s ten-CD box set of the Twentieth Century Composers Series of recordings again focuses on a single composer. Luigi Dallapiccola is somewhat better known than Ben Weber, but not necessarily by a wide margin. Nevertheless, those of us in San Francisco had the opportunity to appreciate his piano music when Anyssa Neumann included his Quaderno musicale di Annalibera in the program she prepared for her Old First Concerts recital at the end of January. This piece consisted of eleven twelve-tone compositions, each on a relatively brief scale. However, that brevity did not obscure the richness of the composer’s capacity for expression, even within the confines of a twelve-tone framework.

That brevity can also be appreciated on the new Sony release. The album consists of five song cycles, the first two of which were part of an overall collection entitled Liriche greche, settings of short poems or fragments in Ancient Greek (as the collection’s title suggests) composed between 1942 and 1945. All of the texts were sung in Italian translations by Salvatore Quasimodo. A little over ten years later, Dallapiccola returned to Quasimodo’s translations to set five more of these brief texts, collected under the title Cinque canti. The fourth collection is a setting of seven poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe composed in 1953. The final selection is a five-movement concerto written for Christmas Eve of 1956. The second and fourth movements are hymn texts by Jacopone da Todi scored for soprano voice. They are interleaved with a prologue, an intermezzo, and an epilogue.

Cinque canti is scored for baritone voice, sung by Frederick Fuller, and eight instruments: two flutes, two clarinets, harp, piano, viola, and cello. All of the other selections are sung by soprano Elisabeth Söderström, accompanied by different combinations of instruments. (None of the collections are limited to voice and piano.) Regardless of the size of the overall ensemble, it is conducted by Frederick Prausnitz.

The durational scale of these song settings reflects the scale of Anton Webern. However, there is a distinctively Italian lyricism to Dallapiccola’s settings that distinguish them from both Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. I found myself struck by Dallapiccola’s absence from my collections of recordings made by Pierre Boulez, both the 20th Century collection released by Deutsche Grammophon and, more significantly, the recorded anthology based on Boulez’ concert series Le Domain Musical, which ran from 1958 to 1967. Did Boulez find Dallapiccola’s approach to atonality too lyrical for his own aesthetic tastes?

As was the case in their treatment of Ernst Krenek, the Sony production team was again negligent in providing the listener with a readable account of what was being sung. The sleeves for both of these CDs reproduced the back face of the original packaging, as well as the front. However, those sleeves scaled down the images from the twelve-inch diameter of a long-playing record, to that of a CD, whose diameter is less than half that size. Thus, in both cases the texts cannot be read without a reasonably strong magnifying glass; and that strength provides a limited field of view. Thus, while the individual texts for the Dallapiccola selections are brief, field of view is so restricted that one can barely keep up with the flow from one song to the next in the overall context of the complete cycle.

The good news is that each selection has its own unique and highly imaginative approach to instrumentation. Coupled with Prausnitz’ keen ear for balancing sonorities, the relationship between voice and instruments is consistently spot-on-the-money. Those interested in the texts themselves will find most of them through Dallapiccola’s Web page in The LiederNet Archive Web site. (The hymns for the Christmas Eve concerto appear to be missing. Sadly, this is also true of the texts for the Krenek CD.)

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