In the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist period, when the light of the end was still far off, Malipiero completed a long-awaited undertaking: an edition...

In the dark years of the Nazi-Fascist period, when the light of the end was still far off, Malipiero completed a long-awaited undertaking: an edition of the complete works of Claudio Monteverdi. Its last volume, the sixteenth, came out in 1942 at the height of the war. The edition contained the sacred production that the publisher Vincenti had assembled in the collection Messa a 4 voci et salmi (1650).

Quartetto Sincronie’s choice to include an arrangement of Monteverdi’s Mass, alternating the parts with Malipiero’s work, is yet another example of reinvention-creation that Malipiero would likely have appreciated. In the composers’ poetics, instruments are asked to sing as voices, and so the opposite—voices translated to instruments—is fitting. Philological rigor was, after all, foreign to Malipiero’s worldview. Instead, the composer spoke of his relationship with Monteverdi as a kind of psychic channeling: finding synchronicity within the synchrony of listening, which dissolves the distance of centuries. The Mass for Four Voices is thus split into parts throughout the record, but it remains possible to orient oneself. The cohesion is melodic: there’s a descending tetrachord G-F-E-D at the beginning of the Kyrie that returns in various guises (inverted, diminished, augmented), articulating the contrapuntal fabric of the different movements. The listener can thus follow this pathway, from the Gloria to the Agnus Dei, in a zigzag that turns Monteverdi the sacred “refrain” to Malipiero’s profane cycle of quartets.