Luogo e data di registrazione		Oratorio San Francesco Poverino, Firenze (Italia) - 13/15 aprile 2008
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Sound Engineer		Matteo Costa
	Artistic direction		Fabio Framba
	Prima Edizione CD		BRILLIANT CLASSICS - 93793 - (1 CD - durata 41' 56") - (p) 2010 - DDD
	Cover		-
	Note		With the patronage of PROVINCIA DI PADOVA. Dedicated to Gian Andrea Lodovici

 

The bald statement that Girolamo Frescobaldi was born in Ferrara in 1583 conveys much more than dry biographical facts: it tells us that the future composer spent his youth immersed in one of the most splendid musical cultures of his day, one that had few equals anywhere in Europe. One of the glories of musical life in Ferrara, cultivated by Duke Alfonso II d’Este, demonstrates the prevailing high standards of music-making in the city: the celebrated Concerto delle dame principalissime, an elite group of the finest and most virtuosic female singers of the day, who performed madrigals for the private enjoyment of Alfonso and his guests, and accompanied themselves on the harp, viol and lute. But the duke’s Concerto grande, a collection of the greatest Italian and Flemish musicians, should not be overlooked. Its members played every kind of wind, string and keyboard instrument, and their ranks were swollen by ‘every citizen of Ferrara who was able to sing and play’. In a modern spirit of education, the duke managed to combine the international ‘star-system’ with cultural promotion at home, involving the entire city, with the result that in Ferrara ‘such was the extent of singing and playing that almost all the children of every father were singers, and one could say the city itself was a single academy’. The undisputed leading figure in this vibrant musical life was Luzzasco Luzzaschi, today remembered principally for his madrigals. During these years, the young Girolamo was learning the organ – the identity of his teacher remains unknown – and he made rapid strides: ‘When he was still a very young man he played all the principal organs in his native city, and achieved great things,’ Agostino Superbi, his first biographer, wrote in 1620. Luzzaschi himself took the promising organist on as a pupil, making Frescobaldi the final member of an ideal dynasty of Ferrara madrigalists, together with Della Viola, Cipriano de Rore and Luzzaschi, to give only the most significant names. He was to remember his first teacher with gratitude for the rest of his life. In 1597, the death of Alfonso II with no legitimate heir and the violent transfer of Ferrara into the Papal States quickly put an end to the musical splendours at court, and the celebrated musicians went their separate ways. Frescobaldi found a patron in Guido Bentivoglio, a member of a powerful family with homes in Bologna and Ferrara. Bentivoglio, who was more or less the same age as Frescobaldi, was later known as an historian and scholar, a follower of Giovanni Battista Marino, but he had a distinguished musical background too, as the son of Isabella Bendidio and nephew of Isabella’s sister Lucrezia, who both sang in the first Ferrara Concerto delle dame. The association with this first employer opened up new paths and perspectives for the young Girolamo. Guido Bentivoglio embarked on a career in the church, becoming papal secretary and nuncio, then Archbishop of Rhodes and finally Cardinal of Aragon. As a result of his patron’s diplomatic missions, Frescobaldi moved away from a Ferrara that was now in danger of economic and cultural decline. As part of the powerful Bentivoglio retinue, Frescobaldi travelled first to Rome – a veritable Mecca for musicians in the early 17th century – and then, between 1607 and 1608, to Flanders, the home of the many great composers who had been the life-blood of Italian madrigal writing throughout the entire 16th century. At the court of Archduke Albert in Brussels, Frescobaldi came into contact with musicians from all over Europe – from Flanders, Spain, Italy and England. One of these was Peter Philips, an English composer who had spent three years in Rome, an experience that particularly influenced his madrigal writing. And it was here, in Flanders, that Girolamo decided to have his first works published. The genre he chose was that of the madrigal, felt to be the best test of a young novice composer. The dedication that accompanied the publication provides some interesting details. The work is, of course, dedicated to Bentivoglio: ‘This first fruit of my labours will see the light of day, as is only proper, under the name of Your Most Illustrious Lordship. With infinite kindness you have always deigned to favour me in the exercise of the talent that it has pleased blessed God to bestow on me’. The work was written entirely in Brussels, and consists of a collection of madrigals ‘which I have been composing in Brussels, in the house of Your Most Illustrious Lordship, since I have been in Flanders’. The poetry chosen also demonstrates the Bentivoglio connection: Frescobaldi sets texts by three authors from Ferrara, Annibale Pocaterra, Giovanni Battista Guarini and Orazio Ariosti, the Bologna writer Cesare Rinaldi, as well as Giambattista Marino, whom Bentivoglio admired, and imitated in his own writings. Other poems are now thought to be by Bentivoglio himself or his brother Enzo. Returning to the dedication, we read the statement – utterly conventional in the context – that the composer has agreed to the publication of his efforts only at the ‘great urging’ of several ‘musicians’, and not without ‘some embarrassment’. For all that, there is a genuine sense of trepidation at ‘submitting my work to the judgement of the World’. The work was published by Phalèse, whose press was in Antwerp, and the dedication also tells us that Frescobaldi had gone to the city to oversee the printing: ‘I have come to Antwerp by the leave of Your Most Illustrious Lordship to see this city and to review a set of madrigals’. The result is an edition by one of the best-known publishers of the period, made under the personal supervision of the composer, providing a rare and welcome guarantee of reliability. This first and only collection by Frescobaldi may prove disappointing, it should be said, to those who look for audacious and idiosyncratic touches, for madrigals that provide the thrill of extreme chromaticism, or are fascinated by the unusual harmonic sequences and formal daring of a Gesualdo or a Monteverdi. With his Opus 1, written when he was barely 25 years old, the composer paid a masterly homage to the musical tradition and culture of his formation in Ferrara, vying with his teachers and skilfully assimilating their language, and recasting it in a personal but not drastically different way. The nineteen madrigals with which Frescobaldi introduced himself have an admirable clarity of formal design that gives each line its due weight in terms of duration and emotion, and a transparent counterpoint that favours delicacy over density as a stylistic means, homophonic and polyphonic sections being cleverly alternated. It is pleasing to see the respect that Frescobaldi pays to the texts: the words are set to graceful melodic phrases, and never obscured by excessive counterpoint, but interpreted literally with immediate attention to meaning. I leave to the listener the pleasure of discovering the many metaphorical links between text and music, but I would like to single out a few, by way of example. In No.20 the words ‘Se lontana voi siete’ (if you are distant) are set with a ‘distant’ leap of an octave for one soprano; the few instances of melismatic writing are reserved for words such as ‘riso’ (laughter), and ‘gioia’ (joy) in No.14, ‘fuggi’ (flee) in No.10, ‘invola’ (snatch away) in No.17, but also ‘ira’ (anger) in No.6. After ‘partì la vita’ (life has departed) in No.18, there is a silence more eloquent than any flurry of notes. The homorhythmic setting of ‘Cara armonia celeste’ (dear, celestial harmony) in No.4 places the emphasis on the harmonic element alone. There are some madrigalisms that cannot be heard, but only deciphered visually from reading the score: words like ‘funeste’ (deathly) and ‘cieco’ (blind) are set in the black notes that indicate triple time. In his madrigals Frescobaldi thus adopts a style that leaves room for florid vocal decorations and elements of colour from the instrumentation. All this has deep roots in the Ferrara tradition, which can be heard in Modo Antiquo’s interpretations. I have chosen women’s voices in line with the many high tessituras in the score, and have allowed for a dialogue between voices and different instrumental colours, as was the case in Alfonso d’Este’s secret music room. In a number of other instances, contemporary reports have provided an ideal guide to interpretation. These include the words of Nicola Vicentino, who urges the performer to take every freedom with rhythm, timbre and dynamics, as long as the music and text justify it: ‘In performing songs in the vernacular, in order to give satisfaction to the listeners, one must sing the words in a way that conforms with the opinion of the Composer; and express with the voice those intonations the words accompany, with passions that are now merry, now sad, at times gentle and at times severe, and with one’s delivery adhere to the pronunciation of the words and of the notes; and at times one uses certain procedures in the compositions that cannot be written, such as singing soft and loud, and fast and slow, and according to the words changing the measure to demonstrate the effects of the passions, the words and the harmony’. His words were echoed almost a century later by Pietro della Valle, who praised those singers who knew the ‘art of soft and loud, of gradually increasing the volume of the voice and gracefully letting it fade, of judiciously following the words and their sense, of making the voice merry or melancholy, tender or bold as required, and other such refinements’. Bettina Hoffmann