and blows it up, it is not very difficult to assemble the first movement of a symphony (or a sonata) that will be amusing for amateurs and also satisfy the lack of sensitivity of the knowledgeable.<ref>«L'opera di Gian Francesco Malipiero» – essays from Italian and foreign scholars, introduced by Guido M. Gatti, Edizioni di Treviso, 11952, p. 340. – cited from M.Sorce Keller, A «bent for aphorisms»: Some remarks about music and about his own music by Gian Francesco Malipiero, The Music Review, 1978, vol. 39, n. 3–4 – available at </ref>}} Malipiero's musical language is characterized by an extreme formal freedom; he always renounced the academic discipline of variation, preferring the more anarchic expression of song, and he avoided falling into program music descriptivism. Until the first half of the 1950s, Malipiero remained tied to diatonism, maintaining a connection with the pre-19th-century Italian instrumental music and Gregorian chant, moving then slowly to increasingly eerie and tense territories that put him closer to total chromaticism. He did not abandon his previous style but he reinvented it. In his latest pages, it is possible to recognize suggestions from his pupils Luigi Nono and Bruno Maderna. His compositions are based on free, non-thematic passages as much as in thematic composition, and seldom do movements end in the keys in which they started. When Malipiero approached the symphony, he did not do so in the so-called post-Beethovenian sense, and for this reason authors rather described his works as "sinfonias" (the Italian term), to emphasize Malipiero's fundamentally Italian, anti-Germanic approach. He remarked: As Ernest Ansermet once declared, "these symphonies are not thematic but 'motivic': that is to say Malipiero uses melodic motifs like everyone else [...] they generate other motifs, they reappear, but they do not carry the musical discourse – they are, rather, carried by it". Reception The French conductor Antonio de Almeida led the Moscow Symphony Orchestra in recordings of the complete Malipiero symphonies for Naxos (Marco Polo, 1993–1994). Recently, Malipiero's piano repertoire, including his complete concertos, has experienced a revival at the hands of noted Italian pianist Sandro Ivo Bartoli. Malipiero was the subject of the 1985 biographical film Poems of Asolo by Georg Brintrup. Selected works OperasL'Orfeide (1919–1922, Düsseldorf 1925), in tre parti: I "La morte delle maschere", II "Sette canzoni", III "Orfeo"Tre commedie goldoniane (1920–1922, Darmstadt 1926) : I "La bottega da caffè", II "Sior Todero Brontolon", III "Le