1

gabrielisonate e canzoni

per concertar con l'organo

Concertino PalatinoBruce Dickey . Charles Toet

Giovanni Gabrieli was without doubt the greatest composer of the Venetian High Renais-sance. From the time of his successful audition in 1585 until his death in 1612, Giovanni Gabrieli held the position of first organist at the basilica of St. Mark’s in Venice, a position he had taken over from his uncle and teacher, Andrea. In addition, after the death of his uncle in 1587, Giovanni was the principle composer of ceremonial sacred music at St. Mark’s and was responsible for finding and hiring extra singers and instrumentalists for major feast days. The players he had at his disposal, especially the cornettists and trombonists, were among the best to be found anywhere, and their virtuosity is clearly reflected in the music he wrote for them. While his sacred concerted music was more influential in the long run, it is the instru mental music he wrote for these players which probably reached the highest art istic level and has the greatest power to touch modern audiences.This is an astonishing achievement in a period in which virtually all of the most ‘serious’ music was written for singers. Gabrieli was the first composer to elevate the genres of can-zona and sonata to an artistic level equal to the best vocal music of the age. While much has been made (often erroneously) of Giovanni’s innov ations (dynamic indications, specified instrumentations, echo effects, etc.), the truly revolutionary thing about his instrumental music is not the specific devices he employed, but the astonishing quality that it consist-ently attains.All of the ensemble canzonas and sonatas heard on this recording come from Gabrieli’s two principal printed collections, the Sacrae Symphoniae (1597) and the posthumous Canzoni e sonate (1615). Although an enormous amount of stylistic and technical development separates these two collections, the earlier works are already completely unparalleled in their emotional range, their variety of textures, their use of written-out virtuoso embellishments and their brilliant manipulation of instrumental color. The later collection develops all these aspects and adds a new independence of the basso continuo, a more modern approach to ornamentation and greater freedom from the vocal chanson model. The intricacy of some of these later canzonas is breathtaking, yet they represent, oddly, the end of a road. No composer ever took the canzona form beyond where Giovanni had left it. They remain unique instrumental monuments to a genius of the High Renaissance created at a time when the currents of fashion were pulling in a differ ent direction altogether.

Concertar con l’organoGabrieli’s sonatas and canzonas have been the subject of substantial scholarship and have found their way into the standard repertoire of brass ensembles both traditional and ‘authen-tic’. Despite the enormous progress made in recent years in understanding this music and its performance, one stubborn obstacle has remained to performing this music as it might have been played at St. Mark’s: the organs. The English diarist John Evelyn stated that the cornetto was the instrument which ‘gave life to the organ’, and indeed instrumentalists normally played on the organ loft or ‘in the organ’ (nell’organo), as the Italians put it. The en semble sound was thus a blend of the characteristically sweet timbre of 16th-century Italian organs with the somewhat more penetrating, though still vocal sounds of cornetti, violins and trombones.

HMA 1951688

GABRIELIsonate e canzoniper concertar con l'organo

Concertino PalatinoBruce Dickey . Charles Toet

In quest of lost organs. All attempts to ‘reconstruc

t’

the famous sonatas and canzones of Gabrieli

as

they were played at San Marco in Venice have come

up against a major obstacle: the disappearance o

f

the two organs of the basilica after his death. On

e

of the principal virtues of this recording is that

it

has tried to restore the original stereophonic effe

ct

of the works as accurately and naturally as possib

le

by performing them in San Petronio in Bologn

a

where two organs very similar to those in Veni

ce

have survived.

2

gabrielisonate e canzoni

per concertar con l'organo

Concertino PalatinoBruce Dickey . Charles Toet

Unfortunately, the pair of organs for which St. Mark’s was famous in Gabrieli’s day has long since perished. The two large organs facing each other from opposite sides of the choir were described by Banchieri as ‘most perfect’. The traditional ‘first organ’, played by Giovanni Gabrieli, was the larger of the two, while the somewhat smaller ‘second organ’ was described as ‘sweeter’ in timbre, indeed as ‘extremely sweet, and even more sweet when it is played by the best organist found today in our Italy, and this is Giovanni Gabrieli…’ 1 The organs were not at all large, at least compared to instruments north of the Alps, but were quite typical of north Italian organs of the day. Such instruments, judging both by con-temporary descriptions and surviving instruments, were both clear and sweet in tone, and possessed a remarkably ‘vocal’ quality.Fortunately, the two magnificent organs in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, restored between 1974 and 1982, present a direct parallel to the organs of St. Mark’s. The first organ at St. Mark’s was built in 1489 by Fra Urbano while the older of the two Bolognese organs was built by Lorenzo da Prato between 1471 and 1475. Both organs had 24’ princi-pals, a single manual and a pull-down pedal. The organ of Fra Urbano had seven ranks while the Lorenzo da Prato had ten, though this large number of ranks is partly due to its double prospect with the 24’ principal in the front prospect and a 12’ octave in the rear. The second organ in San Petronio, built by Baldassarre Malamini in 1596 as a companion to the Lorenzo da Prato organ, is a 16’ instrument with a double prospect and 10 ranks.The organs of San Petronio are tuned in 1/4 comma mean tone temperament at a pitch one half tone above a=440. Though the pitch at St. Mark’s cannot be known with certainty, indications are that it was very high, and the organs would certainly have been in mean tone. The two Bolognese instruments together are thus perfectly suited to the double-choir ensemble music of Giovanni Gabrieli, and the acoustics of San Petronio, while considerably more reverberant than those of St. Mark’s, seem to us appropriate to this wonderful music conceived for the mosaic-covered vaults of the Venetian Basilica.We hope that this recording will help to re-integrate the sound of the Italian 16th-century organ into our aural image of the ensemble music of Giovanni Gabrieli. We also hope in so doing that we have brought some new colors and a renewed sense of vocality to music too often identified with tonal brilliance alone.

BRUCE DICKEY

1. “soavissimo; e tanto più è soave, quanto viene dal più eccellente organista, c’habbia ogg di la nostra Italia sonata; e questi-è Giovanni Gabrieli…”