Froberger: Vartolo, Sergio

This is a significant recording for several reasons. Sergio Vartolo has now recorded all of Frescobaldi’s keyboard music (the other issues were on the Tactus label). The Fantasie (1608) and Ricercari (1615) are the earliest of Frescobaldi’s keyboard publications (the latter being issued in the same year as the more famous first book of Toccatas), and as far as I’m aware neither had been issued complete before; so to get both together, and at super-budget price, is treasure-trove indeed. Frescobaldi fanatics need read no further. (Gramophone)

Reissue in the Brilliant Classics Opera Collection of this excellent “HIP” performance of Monteverdi’s ever popular L’Orfeo, history’s first real opera. Soloists include the crème of Baroque Voices: the great Sara Mingardo, Sylvia Pozzer, Gabriella Martellacci, Gianpaolo Fagotto and the inspiring and historically based direction of Sergio Vartolo. Narrating the famous tale of the Thracian singer Orpheus and his quest to the underworld to bring his wife, Euridice, back to the land of the living, Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is one of the most enduringly popular of all operatic works.

Giocomo Antonio Perti (1661-1756) was an Italian composer who was the dominant personality of the later Bologna school whose 21 operas were widely successful. He also wrote some 200 chamber cantatas, 28 Masses, 20 oratorios and about 150 large scale Psalms and Motets.

Sergio Vartolo, the director of the Cappella Musicale di S. Petronio di Bologna, has sought to place the Mass within a liturgical sequence recalling early performance tradition. Thus it opens with the plainchant introit Gaudeamus omnes in Domino (intended for a major feast of the Virgin Mary) and after the Gloria comes a Gradual and an organ paraphrase of the hymn Ave maris stella (by Girolamo Cavazzoni), very well played by Vartolo himself. Then comes the plainchant Alleluia and, following the Credo, the Gregorian Offertory, Beata ex Virgo Maria, which leads on to the Sanctus; the communion verse precedes Palestrina’s very beautiful double Agnus Dei. The performance has striking character and powerful devotional feeling and is very well recorded in the Church of St Zeno, Cavalo, Verona.

The lament became a current and important feature of Italian Baroque monody, with its rhetorical and therefore dramatic connotations, generally set over a four-note descending bass line. The best known, though not the earliest, of these laments is probably Monteverdi's Lamento d'Arianna, a later version of which, with a sacred Latin text, was included in the composer's Selva morale e spirituale, published in Venice in 1641. In 1607 Monteverdi had provided the music for a favola in musica performed at the court of Duke Vincenzo Gonzaga in Mantua, where the composer was maestro di cappella. Orfeo, with a libretto by Alessandro striggio, has a literary source in the Metamorphoses of Ovid. The success of Orfeo led to the creation of a new dramatic work, a tragedy in musica, in 1608, a deliberate attempt, as the pastoral Orfeo was not, to create a work that would in some way revive ancient Greek tragedy.

Commozione umana e bel canto barocco nel più fortunato dei drammi sacri di Perti, composto nel 1685, poi rimaneggiato e rieseguito più volte fino al 1718.

Born in Italy in the 16th century, Palestrina ranks with Lassus and Byrd as one of the most important figures in the music of this time. In his Missa L'homme arme, Palestrina makes use of a fifteenth-century secular song of the same name as a cantus firmus for polyphonic elaboration. This performance of the mass, with its interpolation of organ ricercari by Girolamo Cavazzoni, seeks to restore earlier performance traditions.

Sergio Vartolo gave us a broader understanding of Palestrina's output of Masses by recording for another label a group of less familiar Mass settings, many for the first time, that offer a contrast with the more familiar solemn polyphonic style.