Until the middle of the seventeenth century, the trumpet was essentially
a ceremonial instrument, played by soldiers and courtly attendants
rather than musicians; it was normally used in trumpet-and-drum bands,
in which fanfares and popular tunes were clothed in improvised drone
accompaniments. However, German composers such as Michael Praetorius and
Heinrich Schütz began to experiment with using trumpets in composed art
music around 1620, and soon after 1650 composers began to write
concerted sonatas for one or two trumpets with strings and continuo—the
repertory that is explored in this disc.
It is normally thought that the first trumpet sonatas were written in
Bologna. The earliest printed trumpet sonatas were certainly published
in 1665 by Maurizio Cazzati, maestro di capella at San Petronio in
Bologna between 1657 and 1671, and the archives at San Petronio contain a
large repertory of sonatas, sinfonias and concertos with trumpets, some
of which are included on this CD. However, there are trumpet sonatas
surviving in manuscripts in northern European libraries that may be just
as early or even earlier. A case in point is the sonata by the Roman
composer and singer Alessandro Melani. It is found in manuscript at
Uppsala in Sweden, probably copied in the 1680s or ’90s though a shorter
version for a single trumpet in an Oxford manuscript may go back to the
middle of the century. The piece is in an early style and is in C major
rather than D major, the standard key for later Italian trumpet music.
The piece is also unusual in that the violin parts are in scordatura
(using violins tuned b-e'-b'-e'' instead of g-d'-a'-e''). It is not
clear whether that was part of Melani’s original conception, though it
certainly creates an unusual and attractive sonority.
Alessandro Stradella was another important early composer of trumpet
music. Like Melani, he worked in Rome for much of his career, though by
1681, when he wrote the wedding cantata Il barcheggio, he was living in Genoa; he was murdered in a Genoese street the following February and Il barcheggio
is said to have been his last work. Its self-contained sinfonia sounds
remarkably modern, partly because it uses a bright scoring with three
equal treble parts, and partly because it has a clear four-movement
structure, with logical harmonic patterns.
Another early trumpet work is the sonata by Andrea Grossi, published
in his Op 3 of 1682. It has a some archaic features—for instance, the
trumpet tends to alternate rather than combine with the upper
strings—though the central adagio, featuring the trumpet in an
expressive rather than virtuosic role, is unusual for the time. Little
is known about Grossi, though he is known to have been a violinist in
the service of the Duke of Mantua around 1680.
The three trumpet works in this programme by Bologna composers offer a
sample of forms and styles around 1700. The sonata by Giuseppe Maria
Jacchini has the same three-treble scoring as the Stradella sinfonia,
though it is more old-fashioned in its structure and musical language:
it is relatively short-winded and is a patchwork of six short,
contrasted sections. Jacchini was a cellist in the musical establishment
at San Petronio from 1680 until his death in 1727, and may have been
partly responsible for developing the cello as a solo instrument in
concerted sonatas; in the present sonata the central trumpet solo has a
soloistic bass part that is clearly intended for his instrument.
In the sonatas by Lazzari and Torelli the cello is given a proper
solo accompanied by a separate continuo part; in the Lazzari it has an
expressive duet with the first violin, while in the Torelli it has a
duet with the trumpet. Both works illustrate the trend around 1700 to
more virtuosic and idiomatic writing, and for longer, more logically
organized separate movements instead of the old ‘patchwork’ structures.
Lazzari was a Franciscan monk who worked in his native Bologna
throughout his life, with the exception of two periods spent in Venice.
Torelli was also a native of Bologna and worked there until 1696, though
he spent most of his later career in Germany.
We do not know where and when Vivaldi wrote his well-known concerto,
his only work for trumpets and strings. It is similar in idiom to some
Bologna works, though it is in C major rather than D major—a distinctive
feature found in other works by Vivaldi with trumpet.
As a contrast to the major-key and generally lively trumpet works, we
have included some contemporary examples of four-part string sonatas.
The sonata à quattro was less popular at the time than the ubiquitous
trio sonata, and is rather neglected today, though it contains a wealth
of fine music with a preponderance of introspective, minor-key works—as
this CD demonstrates. It is also of interest in that the genre is the
true ancestor of the Classical string quartet. The sonatas by Cazzati
and Vitali are typical examples of Bolognese four-part sonatas: they are
relatively brief, are full of dense counterpoint and have chromatic
sections. Vitali was born in Bologna and studied with Cazzati, though he
spent most of his career at the Modenese court.
The sonatas by Legrenzi and Scarlatti are also densely contrapuntal,
though they are quite different in style. Legrenzi was working in Venice
in 1673, when he published his Op 10, and dedicated the collection to
the Austrian emperor Leopold I, which is presumably why it includes two
sonatas for four viols and continuo. Viols were largely obsolete in
Italy at the time, but were still cultivated a good deal in Austria.
This is probably why the sonata recorded here was printed in a
double-clef format, allowing it to be played in C minor on viols and in E
minor by a string quartet. In the work Legrenzi achieves a remarkable
synthesis between the contrapuntal idiom of the Renaissance and the
chromatic harmony of his own time. We do not know anything about the
origins of Alessandro Scarlatti’s work, except that it is found in
manuscripts in Paris and Münster as a sonata for string quartet ‘senza
cembalo’, but as a concerto with continuo and additional ripieno string
parts as the first of a set of Six Concertos published in London
around 1740. It is likely, however, that the concerto version is not
Scarlatti’s work, and was cobbled together in eighteenth-century
England; the additional parts certainly do not add anything to the
original.
Two features of
this recording are worthy of comment. First, all the
works are played one to a part. There is no doubt that the sonata à
quattro was essentially thought of as chamber music rather than
orchestral music around 1700, even though the genre was often used in
church. Furthermore, Richard Maunder has recently argued that the
concerto was normally a one-to-a-part genre during the Baroque period;
the vast majority of all Baroque concertos survive only in single sets
of parts, even in places such as San Petronio in Bologna, where other
genres were performed with large forces. Second, it has become
fashionable in recent years to use large continuo groups of plucked
instruments in all sort of Baroque music. However, the printed and
manuscript sources of the repertory recorded here normally only have a
single continuo part, most commonly labelled ‘organo’. For this reason
we have used a fine Italian-style organ by Goetze and Gwynn for this
recording. It is typical of the single-manual instruments used in
Italian Baroque churches, and is much more powerful than the small
portable chest instruments usually heard in modern performances and
recordings.
(Peter Holman)