Luogo e data di registrazione		Chiesa Auditorium di Santa Caterina, Treviso (Italia) - 3/5 maggio 2009
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Sound Engineers		Matteo Costa, Gabriele Robotti
	Artistic direction		GianMichele Costantin
	Prima Edizione CD		BRILLIANT CLASSICS - 94020 - (1 CD - durata 72' 38") - (p) 2010 - DDD
	Cover		-
	Note		With the patronage of PROVINCIA DI PADOVA.

 

Frescobaldi’s introduction To the students of this work: Since for some the performance of these pieces might prove difficult, in view of the different tempos and variations, and, further, since it appears that many have abandoned the practice of studying from a score, I wish to point out that in those places that seem not to be governed by contrapuntal practice, one should first search for the affect of the passage, and the composer’s intention for pleasing the ear, and discover the manner of playing it. In those compositions entitled Capriccio I did not maintain as easy a style as in my ricercars, but their difficulty should not be judged before trying them out adquately at the keyboard, where one will discover through study which affect must prevail. Furthermore, since my purpose is ease of performance as well as beauty, it seems appropriate that the performer to whom the playing of a piece from the beginning to the end seesm too difficult, shall feel free to paly whichever passages he likes best, as long as he ends with those the conclude in the dey. The beginnings should be taken adagaio, in order to give more spirit and beauty to the following passage, and the cadences should be held back somewhat before the next passage is begun. In the trippole or sequialtere: if they are major, one must play adagio; if they are minor, somewhat more allegro; if three semiminims, more allegro; if there are six against four, one must take their tempo by an allegro beat. It is appropriate to hold back at certain dissonances and arpeggiate the, in order to make the following passage more live. This is said in all modesty, and I entrust myself to the good judgement of the students. ···················· Published by Frescobaldi in 1624 when he was at the height of his powers, the Primo Libro di Capricci was dedicated to Alfonso D’Este, Prince of Modena and successor to the Dukes of Ferrara, the city in which Frescobaldi was born. In the dedication he refers to Ferrara, acknowledging his debt to his teacher there, Luzzascho Luzzaschi, whose own keyboard works and madrigals were an inspiration for these pieces. For Frescobaldi the word ‘capriccio’ describes a fairly rigorous genre, based on contrapuntal ingenuity, but with a degree of freedom and an invitation to display inventiveness and even quirkiness. It represents a cross between the composer’s stricter ricercars and his freer canzonas. Like the former, each musical idea is worked through consistently; from the latter comes a structure in separate sections, marked off by welldefined cadences which are often decorated with ornamental, quasi-improvisatory flourishes, as well as regular changes of tempo and time-signature. The capriccios are conceived as music for cognoscenti, who could appreciate the clevernesses and occasional musical jokes, but they can appeal to anyone who is prepared to listen repeatedly. As the Frescobaldi scholar Alexander Silbiger has written in the New Grove article on the composer: ‘the capriccios are not among the most performed of Frescobaldi’s works but they provide the connoisseur with continual surprises and pleasures and demonstrate Frescobaldi’s compositional ingenuity and imagination functioning at their highest levels’. While playable on any keyboard, or indeed by four separate instruments, it is on the organ that these pieces work best, their sectional nature allowing for changes in registration to provide contrast and climactic buildups. The capriccios also give us an insight into the improvisation techniques which won Frescobaldi huge acclaim in early-17th century Rome, showing his ability to take a very simple musical idea and run with it for up to eight minutes. The initial subject provides the material for almost everything else: it is inverted, augmented and diminished as well as providing material for a variety of countersubjects. There is usually a chromatic version which fills up the gaps with semitones, and regular changes of time-signature allow for different rhythmic readings. The 12 capriccios take a variety of musical ideas as their basis. Five are based on the solmization syllables used to sing and learn the first six notes of the scale. These were the same then as they are today, except that the first was ‘ut’ rather than ‘doh’. The resulting hexachord, ascending or descending, provided the most basic of themes, used in the first two of Frescobaldi’s capriccios. The fourth piece uses a popular variant of the descending hexachord; the eleventh has an added vocal part which uses five of those six notes while the third uses the two-note call of the cuckoo (‘sol-mi’). Capriccios Five, Six, Seven and Twelve employ popular melodies or basses of the time; the tenth is based on a short theme which is presumably Frescobaldi’s own. Capriccios Eight and Nine are different in employing compositional techniques rather than specific themes. The whole book can be seen to have an educational purpose: leading students from pieces based on simple scales to more complex patterns, through an ostinato (the cuckoo call), chromatic patterns and suspensions, the adding of a voice for the performer to sing and, finally, the opportunity to show off (both creatively and as performer) in the virtuosic final capriccio based on a well-known chord pattern. In the first two capriccios Frescobaldi plays with our expectations by sometimes changing the final note of both hexachords. In the second section of the first capriccio, the final note, which we expect to be ‘la’ (A), drops back to what seems to be ‘mi’ (E) but is in fact ‘la’ in a different hexachord, that starting a fourth lower on G. Hexachords were used to transpose and modulate and so people at the time would not have been wholly surprised by this move, while not necessarily expecting it. The third section sharpens ‘fa’ (F sharp) a few times before returning to the basic form. At the start of the second capriccio the ‘ut’ at the end of the descending hexachord is a semitone higher than expected (C sharp rather than C, G sharp rather than G); this did not affect its labelling as ‘ut’ but allows the music to have tonal cadences in A minor and D minor. We do get the standard modal version later in the piece. Cuckoo calls were commonly used as an ostinato, or repeated figure, in music of the baroque period – Louis-Claude Daquin’s Le Coucou being the most famous – presenting the challenge of avoiding potential monotony. Frescobaldi’s top part consists only of the repeated minor-third cuckoo call, always at the same pitch, but with the time intervals between them varying constantly so that, as in nature, we never know when to expect one. The harmony underneath shifts constantly and there is great rhythmic variety, including sections in triple time so that, even with the other parts also permeated by minor thirds, we don’t get bored. The solmization syllables ‘la, sol, fa, re, mi’ seem to have been first used by Josquin des Prez in the late fifteenth century as the basis for a Mass. They mapped onto the Italian phrase ‘lascia fare mi’ (‘let me do it’). This fourth piece has some of Frescobaldi’s most inventive countersubjects and the shortening of note-values as it goes on increases the sense of moving to a climactic conclusion. The next three capriccios are based on well-known chordal patterns or basses used for dancing, to which melodies such as La Spagnoletta were fitted and with which they became associated. The melody over the Basso Fiamengo has the long-short-short rhythmic pattern used in canzonas of the period. The seventh capriccio is an exception in being in fact a set of five partite, or variations, on the aria ‘Or chè noi rimena’; Frescobaldi was to omit it from his second edition of 1626. This aria has again been fitted around a bass/chordal pattern used for dances and is very similar to the Aria detto Balletto on which Frescobaldi was to base a set of variations in his Second Book of Toccatas of 1627. The short eighth and ninth capriccios use a different musical language from the others, that of the elevation toccata played at the central point of the Mass when host and chalice were elevated. Since the Mass was considered to be a re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice on Calvary a dissonant style, similar to that used for Holy Week music, was employed for these toccatas. This consisted in chromatic passages, suspensions (ligature in Italian) and other dissonances (durezze) which resolved according to accepted rules. One of these rules was that suspensions – where a note is prepared as a consonance and then tied over, or repeated, to become a dissonance – should subsequently resolve downwards by step to become consonant again. Frescobaldi’s eighth capriccio uses ‘ligature al contrario’ where the suspension resolves upwards, breaking with convention. To our ears this is nothing strange, since such retardations (as they came to be called) were common practice in the Classical and Romantic periods, but at the time they would have seemed contrary and unsettling. The ninth capriccio rights the balance by correctly resolving its many suspensions downwards by step, softening the effect of its durezze. Both pieces explore the tonal space in what may appear a random way but is actually carefully planned. The soggetto of the tenth capriccio again reminds us of a canzona opening and lends itself to stretto entries which pile up on top of each other at close range. The eleventh uses a compositional device which challenges the performer: finding all of the places in the written-out four parts where a short fifth ostinato part can be fitted and sung. The most commonly used phrase for this was the six-note plainchant melody of the litany refrain ‘Sancta Maria’. This was used by Monteverdi in the Sonata sopra Sancta Maria which forms part of his 1610 Marian Vespers (Monteverdi wrote out all its appearances in that case) and was to be used by Frescobaldi in his Fiori Musicali of 1635 where the singer, as here, had to work out where to enter. In this eleventh capriccio the obbligo has eight notes: the solmization syllables can be used or a more extended saint’s name like ‘Sancte Ioannis Baptistae’ could be fitted, since the opening notes are the same as those of the litany refrain. The final Capriccio is based on another popular bass/chord pattern, associated with the character Ruggiero from the crusading epic, Orlando Furioso, by Ludovico Ariosto, who spent time working for the Este family in Ferrara. It thus emphasises the Ferrarese origins of the collection’s dedicatee, Alfonso D’Este. The tune which eventually emerges is similar to the Bergamasca with which Frescobaldi was to end his Fiori musicali. Like that piece, the twelfth capriccio is a virtuosic tour-de-force which ends in a riot of short notes and descending scales, linking back to the opening pieces of the collection. © Noel O’Regan, 2010