Renato De Grandis

Forty-eight piano preludes, in four books of twelve, by the Venetian composer Renato de Grandis. He wrote them between 1998 and 2002, more than ten years after he had announced that he would stop composing altogether. Gathered under the title Movimento perpetuo, they take up two discs and almost two and a half hours. They condense nearly the whole range of his musical thinking into pieces that are often miniatures.

De Grandis was born in Venice on 24 October 1927 and died on 2 December 2008. He studied at the Venice conservatory, where his teachers included Gian Francesco Malipiero and Bruno Maderna, and for years he counted among the leading figures of the European avant-garde. He lived in Germany for some twenty years, mostly in Darmstadt, and then for ten in Brussels. In 1987, shortly after his sixtieth birthday, he gave up composing and returned to Italy. He turned to philosophy, prose and poetry, painting, teaching and travel, and to Buddhism, the Kabbalah and theosophy. The pianist Antonio Tarallo recorded the cycle between February and June 2013, with Corrado Ruzza as engineer.

In his introduction to the preludes De Grandis linked their characters to "a life full of traveling far and wide" and of uninterrupted learning and discovery. The titles say as much. Next to "Clair de lune", "Notturno", "Sarabanda" and several toccatas stand "Midrash", "YHWH", "Antahkarana" and "The Kailash Prelude", while two pieces look out from the terrace and the banks of Adyar. Each prelude is free in form and length and sets itself a particular technical problem: "Piccolo studio sulle ottave e sulle risonanze", "Sul ritmo 1-1.2" or a twelfth prelude that ends in a fugue "con molte licenze". The fourth book, written in 2002, is split into Poemi Friulani and Sei Ultimi Preludi. The Friulian poems name the Natisone valley, the plain of Aquileia and the hidden course of the Timavo.

The preludes belong to the late return that followed his withdrawal, which lasted only a few years; according to the label it was travelling that led him back to music. Heard in order, the four books read like a diary of that return, moving between Venetian folk song, religious texts and the landscapes of Friuli. In 2018 his widow, Brigitte Grossmann de Grandis, gave his personal archive to the Institute of Music of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice.

2CD, Wergo WER 6787 2, released in 2013 (total time 145'37").