Luogo e data di registrazione		Villa Beatrice d'Este, Baone, Padova (Italia) - 2/3 novembre 2008 (Claviembalo) Chiesa di Santa Barbara, mantova (Italia) - 5 novembre 2008 (Organo e Schola Gregoriana)
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Sound Engineers		Matteo Costa, Gabriele Robotti
	Prima Edizione CD		BRILLIANT CLASSICS - 93794 - (2 CD's - durata 60' 18" & 67' 31") - (p) 2009 - DDD
	Cover		-
	Note		With the patronage of PROVINCIA DI PADOVA

 

By 1627 the 44-year-old Girolamo Frescobaldi was at the height of his powers: he was organist at the largest church in the world – St Peter’s Basilica in Rome – and in great demand as a player and teacher, with a number of publications to his credit. Following the success enjoyed by his First Book of Toccatas of 1615, he felt confident enough to preface his Second Book of 1627 with an engraved portrait of himself. The volume, again beautifully hand-engraved by Nicolò Borbone, was dedicated to Monsignor Luigi Gallo, Bishop of Ancona and nuncio in Rome of the Kingdom of Savoy. The nephew of an important cardinal, Gallo was also an excellent keyboard player and Frescobaldi’s pupil. The Second Book of Toccatas is a more eclectic collection than the first. It has 11 toccatas to start but continues with an intabulated madrigal, some canzonas and some stylised dance music, four sets of variations and a set of liturgical items appropriate for Vespers. It is these last pieces, especially, which mark out this volume as different. Reproducing the sort of music Frescobaldi played regularly in St Peter’s or in other Roman institutions, it consists of sets of versets for alternatim performance with a plainsong choir, of four hymns, and of Magnificats in three of the church tones or modes. The toccatas in this Second Book also have a more liturgical leaning, with four specifically written for organ and a fifth clearly intended primarily for that instrument. The term ‘toccata’ comes from the Italian word ‘toccare’ (to touch) and the genre grew out of the improvisations with which keyboard players tried out the instrument and the mode in which they were about to play, whether in church or in chamber performance. On this recording the initial touching of the keys is represented by some improvisatory bars which lead into the beginnings of a number of the toccatas. In the 1637 reprint of the Second Book of Toccatas Frescobaldi included his instructions to the player originally printed in the First Book in 1615. In these he emphasized freedom of tempo and expression and compared the toccatas to modern madrigals in which short musical gestures illustrated individual words and phrases. The toccatas, of course, had no words but the music is similar, representing a different emotion or affetto every few bars. They are also virtuosic showpieces, laden with figurations or passaggi and giving players considerable freedom in interpretation. The toccatas in Book Two seem even more assured than those in the earlier book, more structured but also more diverse, many of them including triple-time sections and more regular canzona-like segments. Similarly the canzonas in this second book have toccata-like free sections which link their more regular imitative ones. The first two toccatas are in the common Dorian mode, transposed from D up to G, which is close to our modern G minor scale. Both were intended for harpsichord and they alternate wistfully expressive sections with more extrovert and showy ones. Toccatas 3 and 4 are elevation toccatas, intended to be played during and after the elevation at Mass. In D Dorian and A Aeolian modes, respectively, they use chromatic movement and suspensions to create an atmosphere appropriate to the central action of the Catholic liturgy, where the Passion of Christ is re-enacted. Toccata 4 is here played on the voce humana stop which creates a tremolo effect by using two sets of pipes tuned to slightly different pitches. Toccatas 5 and 6, on the other hand, are for full organ and for playing at more exuberant moments in the liturgy in a large building like St Peter’s. They are designed to be played either with long-held pedal notes (as on this recording) or without. The use of the pedals adds to the harmonic build-up and the subsequent release of tension when the note changes, normally resolving onto a note a fifth or fourth down. In the G Mixolydian and F Lydian (with a B flat) modes respectively, these toccatas use scales, arpeggios and chromatic movement to fill out the slow-moving harmonies. Toccata 7 marks a return to the harpsichord for one of the most tightly constructed of all Frescobaldi’s toccatas, again in the D Dorian mode, which includes a mini-ricercar or imitative section in the middle. Toccata 8 is subtitled ‘di durezze e legature’ (‘with dissonances and suspensions’) and has much in common with the elevation toccata genre, using a continuous series of dissonances and resolutions which particularly exploit the differences between intervals in non-equal temperament. It shares the Lydian F mode with Toccata 9, the most mercurial of the set, which exploits quick rhythms and calls for a high level of independence between the hands. Frescobaldi acknowledges this by appending the phrase ‘non senza fatiga si giunge al fine’ (‘not without exertion is the end reached’) at the end of the piece. The final two toccatas return to the mood of the first two, exploiting common figurations in the D Dorian and G Mixolydian modes respectively. In place of a 12th toccata Frescobaldi includes a heavily ornamented intabulation of the madrigal Ancidetemi pur, originally composed by the early 16th-century French composer Jacques Arcadelt. Having settled in Florence, Arcadelt was largely responsible for the madrigal’s replacing of the French chanson as the premier genre of Italian secular music in the 1530s. Going back so far for a model must have represented an antiquarian interest for Frescobaldi, analogous to that shown by Caravaggio in painting a music print open at an Arcadelt madrigal in his Lute Player, painted for the music-loving Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani in the 1590s. Frescobaldi may also have been paying homage to the Neapolitan keyboard tradition, since two of its leading exponents, Ascanio Mayone and Giovanni Maria Trabaci, had published intabulations of the same madrigal in 1603 and 1615 respectively. The six canzonas which follow are among Frescobaldi’s most attractive. Originally an intabulation of a vocal chanson, the canzona genre grew into a flexible succession of sections which could be used during both church services and secular celebrations. Played here on the organ, the first four start with the traditional long–short–short rhythm and have a succession of imitative sections in duple and triple time, separated by more rhapsodic link passages. The final two, both in the C Ionian mode, exploit the possibilities of triple time only, without link passages. Vespers hymns were some of the best-known plainchants to the seventeenth-century composer. We know that Frescobaldi copied out polyphonic hymn-settings by both Palestrina and Victoria, the giants of the late 16th-century Roman style. They had been written in strict vocal counterpoint and made use of the plainchant, with which the polyphony alternated, as a basis, either as a long note cantus firmus or as fodder for points of imation. Frescobaldi does the same thing in these versets for organ, which would also have alternated with plainchant. On this recording the first verse is sung in chant, to introduce the strophic melody which is then continued as the basis for the organ versets. The hymns are: Lucis Creator optime for Sunday vespers, Exultet coelum laudibus for feasts of apostles, Iste confessor for confessors and the wellknown Ave maris stella for feasts of the Virgin Mary. A similar technique is applied to the three Magnificats, here sung in alternatim with the chant in the appropriate mode, which again provides the musical material for the organ versets. The partite on the Aria detta balletto and La Frescobalda represent something which has been a constant activity for all composer-performers down the ages: the improvisation of variations on popular tunes. The balletto was a chord pattern used for dancing; here Frescobaldi shows particular mastery in constantly moving from duple to triple time and back. The more reflective La Frescobalda, whose tune may be the composer’s own creation, is treated in a similar way. The book continues with five galliards and six correnti; these are, on the face of it, examples of contemporary dance music, but in Frescobaldi’s hands they are also sophisticated miniatures, decorated with figures similar to those used in the toccatas. The first edition of the Second Book of 1627 ended with two further sets of partite or variations, on two of the most common chord patterns of the time, the ciaccona and the passacaglia. Originating in Spain, both were based on closely related four-note recurring bass patterns. They represented early workings towards what became Frescobaldi’s tour de force in this genre, the Cento partite sopra passacagli, which he added to the revised edition of his First Book of Toccatas in 1637, simultaneously removing these two early workings from his revision of the Second Book. The music of Frescobaldi’s Second Book of Toccatas has retained its popularity down to the present day, a popularity based on its utility, its intense harmonic language based on immense contrapuntal skill and its sheer delight in exploiting all the possibilities of the 17th-century keyboard. © Noel O’Regan, 2009