Gian Francesco Malipiero (1882-1973) approached the piano with a sense of expressive freedom, avoiding the conventions of pure virtuosity and preferring a more intimate and reflective language. His piano pieces range from lyrical miniatures to more complex works, in which influences can be recognized from Italian early music to the modernity of Debussy, Casella, Stravinsky, and Scriabin. Alessandro Riccardi has programmed a sequence of pieces written during the 1900s and 1910s. They evoke a creative laboratory, where harmonic experimentation and the search for new expressive forms intertwine with a deep respect for the past. From 1905, the 6 Morceaux represent the first expression of Malipiero’s compositional personality, where modal influences intersect with late 19th-century trends. Published in 1910, the Tre danze antiche represent Malipiero the assiduous antiquarian, the reviver and transcriber of his 17th-century forebears such as Monteverdi and Gabrieli. The quartet of Preludi autunnali were composed in Venice in September 1914 and foreshadow a period of ‘perpetual tragedy’ in the composer’s music caused by the outbreak of World War I. As Malipiero wrote in 1952: “Their melancholy is perhaps the effect of the war just begun and not yet felt.” Those effects are further amplified in Maschere che passano from 1918, a 10-minute quintet of oblique sketches, presenting high contrasts: mysterious, violent, distant, Malipiero at his most late-Debussyan. In 1920, he then wrote a heartfelt homage to Debussy, followed by ‘Three Homages’, which undercut the solemnity of their title by being dedicated successively to a parrot, an elephant, and ‘an idiot’. Throughout the album, marking Alessandro Riccardi’s debut on Piano Classics, the piano becomes an instrument for personal introspection and sonic exploration, while maintaining a strong connection to Italian tradition and, at the same time, looking into the future.