Rapsodia Italiana

CordArte explore the stylus phantasticus in Early Baroque Italy on Pan Classics. (p) 2023

This album features just three musicians, with Daniel Deuter appearing as the violin soloist, Heike Johanna Linder on gamba and lirone, and Markus Märkl on harpsichord and organ. I’ve enjoyed their recordings in the past. They are playing here some of my favorite music. My first exposure to this style was via Monica Huggett (Fontana, Turini) and Andrew Manze (he made a very good album, entitled Stylus Phantasticus on Harmonia Mundi with Romanesca).

The focus on this album is the exploration of the free-fantastic style, which for us is best characterized by short, contrasting sections of music; the style is dominated by melody and the lead instrument in question is expected to move us through these differences. The analogy that comes to mind is watching a modern fashion show, something new and pretty coming at us, non-stop.

The recorded sound and acoustic of this album is very well done. I believe strongly that with a soloist’s burden in moving us, this chamber music is deservedly played in an intimate setting and I, for one, want to be focused every nuance, every trick under the soloist’s fingers. All three instruments, when playing, are so easy to hear and sound up front and are nicely distributed across the stereo spectrum, with violin on the right. Being so “close” may reveal any technical flaws, of course, but rest assured that everyone in the recording plays cleanly.

For baroque fans like myself, many of these tracks might already be familiar. Which, as presented, it’s kind of nice when you recognize a melody, or the interaction between treble and bass, as in the Stradella trio.

Idiomatic to this music are some stylistic performance details that have shown up in recordings, especially those we might deem “second generation.” This is the layperson’s way of describing these (ornamental style, including those that go beyond trills and mordents to include colorful vibrato and gestures that are most certainly born out of vocal repertoire). As I have heard performances of this music both in recording and in person, these details are what certainly sets this music apart, making it for me, especially satisfying.

You can hear Deuter trying his hand at this in the opening phrase of the first track by Uccellini. The other effect used many times is strong dynamic contrasts. Despite this ensemble’s very tight playing and attention to detail, they are less frequently indulging in these colorful performance practices. I likely hold Enrico Onofri with Imaginarium as the high priest of indulging in this Italiante style, but I can’t speak to the authenticity of it; but upon hearing it, I know I like it a lot. For me, it amplifies the power of this music.

Both Andrew Manze and Gunar Letzbor have recorded the Pandolfi sonatas with appreciably different stylistic signatures; in this recording by CordArte, the playing from the violin is less dramatic; the continuo realized by Richard Egarr in the Manze recording (here I’m speaking to the recording they did for Harmonia Mundi) is especially free and satisfying. Letzbor seemed to make strong contrast the defining feature of his album, but my thoughts are that the solutions they arrived at were a bit too severe. I’d therefore position CordArte’s style somewhere in the middle of these two examples, not specifically only with the music by Pandolfi which is represented on this album, but across the board.

For me, too, this album introduced unfamiliar pieces, and for that, I’m glad to have them to reflect upon.

I do think there’s room in the catalog for more of this music to be performed. To our ears that may be somewhat gentrified to music of the late baroque and the warhorses of the classical era, these earlier pieces carry with them still some exotic references. To understand this music better it’s worth exploring the vocal music that precedes these pieces by at least twenty years. Probably the most emblematic example is Ariana’s lament, which survives from Monteverdi’s lost opera. A single soloist against a bass line. Changing moods… now with this music, the soloist (whether it’s the violin, or in cases other treble instruments, including recorder and cornetto) is charged with moving us to a variety of emotional states.

Despite very competent playing by the ensemble, I’d wished that the solos in this recording were less polite, at times the continuo team too comes across a bit too polite. I think this music has been read with more fire and surprise and for me it’s always a delight. The result here, in contrast with other recordings either of the same pieces or stylistically-conversant music, leaves me feeling the music wasn’t fully exploited to its ultimate capacity to move us.

Some may enjoy the approach here, and the results are far from bland. Nothing performed here for me gets at the pained expression of the statue on the cover. The performances are, just for me, making an analogy again with fashion, less risqué.