Canzoni Natalw Piccoli

This is the fifth and final volume in the Ligia series of the complete keyboard music of Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583–1643). Previous volumes reviewed in Fanfare include the Primo libro di capricci and Secondo libro di toccate (both 34:2), and the Primo libro di toccate (34:6). The present volume includes published collections from the beginning, middle, and end of Frescobaldi’s career. The Primo libro delle fantasie was published while the composer was still in Milan; it served as a kind of audition piece that eventually won him the position of organist at St. Peter’s in Rome.

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)

Italian pop singer Antonella Ruggiero used to sing at parties as a child, her first step to becoming a local star years later. After attending the Fine Arts Academy, she started working as a designer for an advertising company. In 1975, Ruggiero joined Matia Bazar, a popular vocal group founded by Aldo Stilita, which achieved international recognition in the late '70s. In October 1989, she decided to leave the band. After an inspiring length of time in India, Ruggiero began her solo career with the release of an album called Libera in 1996. That was followed by 1997's Registrazioni Moderne, produced by Roberto Colombo. It included the song "Per Un'Ora d'Amore," which climbed the most important Italian charts. In 1998, she came in second place at the San Remo Festival for singing "Amore Lontanissimo."

Andrea Gabrieli (c. 1510-1586) was one of the first native Venetians to hold the positions of Second and then First Organist in the basilica of San Marco. These were the highest musical appointments in the city, and their holders was expected to compose much of the music they played. In the event, like his predecessor Merulo and his successor (his nephew Giovanni Gabrieli), Andrea was adept at all musical forms, especially the new and up-to-date (very secular) madrigal, a sort of vocal chamber music. A splendid selection of these, interspersed with instrumental canzoni (in which one can see the influence he had on his more-famous nephew) that offer welcome contrast to the vocal music. Manfred Cordes leads Weser-Renaissance Bremen in pungent period-instrument performances.

Gabrieli's music, written for a comparatively large ensemble of cornetts, sackbuts (= trombones), dulcian, violins, viola and organ (and in one instance for theorbo), is some of the earliest that can be considered "orchestral", although the use of cornetts and trombones makes it sound, in the main, a bit like music for brass band! The pieces appear to be instrumental developments from earlier vocal compositions (thus the title "Canzone", derived from the word for song) and reflect the situation at St. Mark's Cathedral in Venice, where groups of singers or instrumentalists were placed at various points within the church building to create what we might today call a "surround" effect.