Cavazzoni

The most comprehensive collection of organ music by a major forerunner to Monteverdi, recorded on a historically significant instrument by an organist with a distinguished catalogue of 17th-century repertoire.

Cavazzoni was born into a noble family in Bologna at an unknown date toward the end of the 15th century. His playing was called ‘divino’ while he was still a teenager, and his precocious talents, together with his good upbringing, must have smoothed his path into the service of the Duchess of Urbino, daughter of Isabella d’Este, before 1512; he most likely followed her into exile back at her hometown Mantua in 1516. Those early years earned him the sobriquet ‘d’Urbino’. Later he is documented as a private harpsichordist to Leo X in Rome, as colleague and eventual successor to Vincenzo da Modena, who had played a pedal harpsichord to the famous Duke of Ferrara, Ercole I (his patroness’s grandfather) on his deathbed.

On this CD Fabio Antonio Falcone presents recordings of possibly the two oldest examples of printed keyboard music. He uses three instruments, each of distinctive character: an Italian harpsichord after Alessandro Trasuntino (Venezia 1531) and a polygonal virginal after Domenico da Pesaro (ca.1550), both built by Roberto Livi. For Cavazzoni, he plays the organ of the Church of San Giuseppe, Montevecchio di Pergola, an instrument by a builder now unknown, which dates back to the end of the 17th century.

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.