Luogo e data di registrazione		Germanisches Nationalmuseum, Nürnberg (Germania) - 27-30 ottobre 1976
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Johann-Nikolaus Matthes
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 063-30 936 Q - (1 lp) - durata 44' 39" - (p) 1977 - Analogico (Quadraphonic)
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26504 2 - (1 cd) - durata 44' 39" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

Froberger - Italien Music It is virtually certain that during his earliest years in Stuttgart Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667) came to know the music, musicians and instruments of Italy. Immediately upon entering the service of Emperor Ferdinand II as a chapel organist, Froberger petitioned for a leave of absence and a stipend to allow him to study with great Frescobaldi, organist of St. Peter’s in Rome. The request, at first denied, was granted by Ferdinand III soon after his accession in early 1637. The young German keyboard virtuoso reached Rome by the autumn of 1637, remaining there until the spring of 1641, when he resumed his duties at the Hofburg in Vienna. The details of his years in Rom are obscure, but we do know that, in addition to studying with Frescobaldi, Froberger came into close contact with that remarkable Jesuit polymath, Anasthasius Kircher, and Giacomo Carissimi, a prolific composer ot motets and oratorios and the director of music at the Church of San Apollinare. A letter of 1649 from Froberger to Kircher, only recently discovered, proves that Froberger revisited Italy in that year, performing at a number of princely courts. But the strongest evidence of the profound Italian influence on the composer is the music itself. On regaining Vienna in September 1649, he presented the Emperor with a handsomely bound volume, richly ornamented with rubrics and calligraphy from his own hand, containing a half-dozen each of toccatas, fantasias, canzonas and suites. While the suites are based on French models, which Froberger seems to have preferred to Frescobaldi’s type of dance sequence, the toccatas and polyphonic pieces making up three-quarters of the collection are closely modelled on those of his Italian teacher. Another autograph of similar size and scope dated 1656, also presented to Ferdinand III, and a smaller third collection, without toccatas or suites, and quite undecorated, was given by the composer to the next Emperor, Leopold I, in about 1658. Thus the ltalianate content predominates. The composer’s autographs also prove that he even used the appropriate Italian type of notation in the toccatas and polyphonic works, reserving the French variety (our modern keyboard score) for his suites alone. While deriving in style from Frescobaldi, Froberger’s Italian music is nonetheless highly individual. The toccatas are more tightly organized in fewer sections, generally only three, than the Italian master’s, and are less obviously dramatic in their brilliant passages. The distinctions amongst the various contrapuntal genres are rather subtle. The ricercare is the strictest of all in terms of its close adherence to the prima prattica, the traditional sacred polyphony of the 16th century in Italy. The fantasia has nothing of the freedom and emotional intensity with which the genre is associated in later keyboard music by, say, C. P. E. Bach, Mozart or Schumann. Rather, it is a polyphonic form only slightly less rigourous in its fidelity to the tenets of vocal contrapuntal models than the ricercare. Both of these begin in Froberger’s usage with relatively long note values, as at the start of a motet, but the fantasias do not keep to them strictly and can even introduce divisionlike passages in running semiquavers unthinkable in a ricercar, which remains generally within the limits of what a human voice can produce, in terms of note values as well as melodic intervals. The canzona and capriccio, on the other hand, are essentially instrumental counterpoint. This is immediately apparent from their thematic material. They are quite free of the restraints of the vocal stile antico which fetter the ricercar. At the end of their sections toccata-like passages are sometimes used to ornament and intensify the concluding cadences. Of the four toccatas on this record, surely the best known is No. 2, which was circulating in manuscript copies not long after Froberger put it in his 1649 collection. He is believed to have played it in Brussels in 1650 when he  was for some time in the service of the Emperor’s brother, the governor of the 'Spanish Netherlands. The toccata begins in a distinctly modal improvisatory vein but then develops with regular imitative textures in a clearly tonal manner. The final flourishes are in the free manner of the opening but with the addition of the expressive chromatic harmonies which were introduced in the second section. Toccatas 7, 6 and 9 from the 1656 manuscript are formally speaking quite similar to No.2 but rather more tightly constructed and decidedly more tonal than modal. Fantasia No, 1 is based on the hexachord, the first six notes of our major scale, a favourite subject for keyboard composers since the days of the English virginalists. Froberger’s most extended composition, the fantasla is a sequence of seven sections in each of which the hexachord is subjected to a different rhythmical treatment and pitted against a variety of counter-subjects. The sixth section, in which chromatic passing notes are inserted in the hexachord series, is especially ingenious. From the very first the piece was seen as a paragon of polyphonic style. Soon after it was copied into the 1649 autograph, the composer’s friend, Kircher, both praised and printed it in his Musurgia Universalis, an enormous treatise on music published in Fiome in 1650. Thanks to this publication, one of only two printings of single pieces in the composer’s lifetime, the fantasla was circulated widely as a model for students of counterpoint. Mozart, for instance, made two separate copies of the opening sections, no doubt for a didactic purpose. Fantasia 2 is in the Phrygian mode, but Fruboerger follows normal later Renaissance practice and uses both the normal tonal cadence and the classic Phrygian variety which avoids introducing D sharp. In terms of contrapuntal skill the fantasia is notable for the artistic of stretto, entries of the subject in close succession. Fantasia 5, on the other hand, is less strict in its adherence to the ancient vocal traditions. This is apparent from the very nature of the subject, awkward to sing; the interval of an octave in the second bar would never occur in a ricercar. All three fantasias come from the 1649 collection. Two ricercars are included here, No. 11 from the 1656 autograph and No. 6 from the 1658 collection. (The numbering in Guido Adler's edition is editorial and bears no relationship to the actual chronology.) Ricercar 6 is a finely wrought and very concise piece in three interrelated sections. It is apparently the earliest known example of a keyboard piece in the key of C sharp minor. Whether this then unusual tonality was chosen as a mere notational fancy or to demonstrate in practice a form of tuning less limited in scope than the conventional mean-tone temperament cannot be said with certainty, Ricercar 11 is also something of an avant-garde composition, as it foreshadows the 18th-century fugue by introducing brief non-thematic episodes between the successive expositions, something which was decidedly not the normal practice of Froberger and his contemporaries. Canzona 4 from the 1849 autograph is an extended piece in four distinct sections thematically linked to each other. It is easy to perceive how such an instrumentally conceived piece as the canzona, of which this is a typical example, a genre established long before Froberger’s time, can be regarded as the forerunner of the multi-movement sonata. The two capriccios, No. 8 from the 1656 autograph and No. 13 preserved in 18th-century copies by Gottlieb Muffat and Johann Forkel, the famous Bach biographer, are likewise cast in an instrumental rather than a vocal mould. No. 8 is built on the familiar chromatic figure descending from the tonic to the dominant, as in Purcell’s Did's Lament and the Crucifixus in Bach's great Mass to cite two familiar examples. This also occurs in Toccata II but here the composer both explores and exploits the device more fully and in all four sections of the piece. Capriccio 13 as it has come down to us falls into only two sections, both based on the repeated note figure which begins it. VVhile apparently lacking a section in triple time, an invariable inclusion in this type of polyphonic composition, the capriocio’s second section is written in a type of notation which can quite properly be interpreted in a gigue-like rhythm which builds up the tension to a great climax at the brilliant brief coda. Colin Tilney’s performance treats this concluding section as one in triple meter. Just as in the toccatas and polyphonic keyboard music of Frescobaldi, there is a sensitive balance which is always maintained between form and feeling in Froberger’s Italian music. His mastery of his craft never leads him into mere note-spinning. While accepting the limitations of the forms in which he worked, Froberger manages to invest each of them with a personal quality that proves his respect and esteem for as well as his mastery of them. Notes on the harpsichord used for this recording Apart from some few vocal compositions of church music, Johann Jacob Froberger composed his works for keyboard instruments. In that capacity he was not only one of the greatest, but also the most cosmopolitan composer in the course of the 17th century. His canzonas, fantasias, ricercari and caprices as well as the type of the toccata alla levazione are largely modelled on the style of his master Frescobaldi. Italian influence, for example, comes to light in the character of the variations in the polyphonic works, the audacious harmony, the siciliano-like and Lombardian rhythms occurring now and then, the use of the pedal for the lowest octave of the keyboard in some works. The fugato passages in the toccatas are also Italian, but probably due to his knowledge of Merulo‘s works. His preference for monothematic structure, at times with augmentations and diminutions in the theme, is perhaps due to Sweelinck (through the intermediary of Sweelinck’s pupil Scheidt). The influence of early harpsichord music in France, particularly Charbonnières style, makes itself felt in the suites. With regard to the truly Western European character of Froberger’s style, it seems difficult to connect his keyboard works with a particular type of instrument. As a great part of the piano works derive in style from Frescobaldi and occasionally some other Italian composers, it is not out of place to employ an Italian harpsichord of the 17th century, especially for the reason that French harpsichords from the time before 1700 are more similar to the Italian instruments than those made in the 18th century. The harpsichord used for this recording was made by Carlo Grimaldi, who worked in Messina at the close of the 17th century. The instrument is kept in a richly decorated outer case standing on a wooden baroque pedestral with sumptuous gilded carvings. Like the majority of Italian harpsichords from the second halt of the 17th century this instrument has also a keyboard ranging from G2 to C7 (here without G2 sharp), whereas the interior limit of the keyboard of most Italian harpsichords before c. 1650 was C3. The consequence of this new disposition was the lengthening of the strings in the bass. This accounts for the great length (8 or 9 feet) and the narrovvness on the bass side of many Italian harpsichords dating from this period. The fact is that this instrument from 1697 was made exactly thirty years after Frescobaldi's death. But the works of this composer were already mentioned with praise by Kuhnau as early as in 1700, Georg Muftat and J. S. Bach knew copies of them, and manuscripts transmitted Froberger’s compositions into the first half of the 19th century. So it is not out of place to use a harpsichord dating from the second halt of the 17th century. John Henry van der Meer
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"