Girolamo

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)

Girolamo Frescobaldi - Affetti amorosi - Le Banquet Céleste, Damien Guillon (2018) {Glossa GCD 92370 Official Digital Download}
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© 2018 Glossa | GCD 923702
Classical / Early Baroque

With Affetti amorosi Damien Guillon directs a dazzling selection of vocal works from Girolamo Frescobaldi, drawn from the Ferrara composer’s two books of Arie musicali. These arias date from 1615-1630, by which time Frescobaldi, now resident in Rome, had become a “cult” composer, and permitted great expressive freedom in the performance of his music.

A release of great importance: the first time CD-issue of the Complete Works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. This edition provides a superb opportunity to discover this neglected master of the Baroque. The project is masterminded by the harpsichordist and organist Roberto Loreggian, and previous individual volumes of the series have been well received. This is there first ever complete edition of Frescobaldi’s music to be issued: a landmark on record, sure to be widely noticed by the musical press.

The influence of the music by Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) on contemporaneous composers and on those who worked even between the seventeenth and eighteenth century was truly important. For the necessarily synthetic itinerary delineated in this CD I was inspired by four exemplary compositions excerpted from “Fiori Musicali”. This collection was printed in 1635. In it, the composer proposes works conceived for liturgical use (plus two pieces without a precise collocation within the Mass). These pieces are excerpted from the so-called “Messa della Madonna”, and are a Toccata avanti la Messa, Canzon dopo l’Epistola, Recercar dopo il Credo, Toccata per la Levatione.

Frescobaldi must be accounted one of the most important keyboard composers of the first half of the 17th century. He was born in Ferrara, where the musical tastes of the ruling duke, Alfonso II d’Este, attracted musicians of great distinction. Moving to Rome at the beginning of the new century, he was under the patronage of Guido Bentivoglio, who took him in 1607 to Brussels, an important centre of keyboard music in the northern European tradition. In 1608 he became organist at St Peter’s in Rome, where he remained until his death (with a brief absence for promised employment in Mantua in 1615 and a subsequent period of six years spent serving the Medici in Florence).