Though musicologists have speculated that Dario Castello probably worked at St. Mark’s and probably played violin and/or cornetto, in fact nothing is known about him beyond his music, which was all published in Venice. The numerous reprints of his sonatas and canzoni as late as 1650 attest to his popularity and influence. We will perform the first of his two part sonatas “in stil moderno” published in 1629.

More is known about Biagio Marini, a virtuoso violinist who composed both vocal and instrumental music. Marini traveled extensively and he held positions in Brussels, Neuburg an der Donau, Düsseldorf, Padua, Parma, Ferrara, Milan, Bergamo, and Brescia in addition to his work in Venice. We will perform two works by Marini: his Capriccio, subtitled “in which two violins play four parts” (a reference to the extensive double-stopping in the fiddle parts), and the sonata La Orlandina from Affetti musicali, published in 1617.

Two of the composers represented served in leadership roles in the St. Mark’s musical establishment. Giovanni Rovetta succeeded Grandi as vice maestro at St. Mark’s and assumed the post of maestro di cappella after Monteverdi’s death in 1641. Rovetta’s only published purely instrumental works are four canzonas included in a motet collection from 1626 and we will be performing the second of these canzani.

Francesco Cavalli was engaged as an organist at St. Mark’s while Grandi was in Venice. He went on to become maestro di cappella after Rovetta’s death. Best known for his many operas, Cavalli was also a prolific and respected composer
of sacred and instrumental music. In 1656, Cavalli published his magesterial collection of Vespers music Musiche Sacrae, which served as the basis for Magnificat’s Christmas concert on the San Francisco Early Music Sopciety series in 1996. The collection includes several instrumental canzon for 3 to 12 parts. We will be performing the first of these canzoni.

Hanneke van Proosdij will play a harpsichord Intavolature by Giovanni Picchi, who was hired as organist at the Venetian church of the Frari in 1607 and from 1623 to his death he was also organist at the confraternity Scuola di San Rocco.

Though he spent time in Venice, Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger is most closely associated with Rome. A prolific and highly original composer, Kapsberger is chiefly remembered today for his music for lute, theorbo and chitarrone, which was seminal in the development of these as solo instruments. David Tayler will perform Kapsberger’s Toccata Arpeggiata, a representative of a genre of lute music published during the first decade of the 17th century that exploits the instrument’s facility for appegiation in a way that reminds me of stile briseè of Gaulthier and Chambonieres.

Opening bars of "Amor, giustitia Amor" from Cantade et Arie…1626

The three works in Grandi’s Cantade et Arie a voce sola of 1620 that bear the designation of “cantata” are all constructed using the technique that musicologists now categorize as “strophic bass” cantatas.  In its classic form as represented in these pieces, the same bass line is used for each stanza of a strophic poem with varying melodies in the vocal part.

Ostinato bass lines were already common at the beginning of the century, but these new cantatas were distinguished by the greater length of their recurring bass line and their more definite structure. The strophic bass cantata is anticipated in, for example Monteverdi’s Orfeo in variations of the vocal line above a slightly modified bass line within a ritornello structure are found.

Grandi’s innovation can be seen as a logical extension of an improvised practice. It is likely that performers, in interpreting a strophic song would vary the melodic line for each stanza to emphasize certain words or communicate different sentiments. “Arias” setting strophic poetry are found in innumerable collections from the early years of the 17th Century, and in fact the bulk of Grandi’s 1620 collection is devoted to such strophic songs. One has to think only of Monteverdi’s Si dolce e’l tormento – a remarkably simple looking work on the page – and how it can be varied to exceptional effect in performance.

The cantatas in the 1620 collection formalize this practice, though they certainly do not preclude further embellishment and variation by the singer. There are numerous accounts of virtuosi, like Francesca Caccini, who could improvise a musical setting of poem and one can imagine that a strophic bass technique would lend itself to such extemporizing.

Grandi’s cantatas were immensely popular. The newly identified print from 1620, from which the cantatas on Magnificat’s program are drawn was in fact a reprint of an earlier publication and he went on to publish three more collections over the next decade, only one of which survives. Numerous composers imitated the cantatas, including Monteverdi himself.

Even in the 1620s we can observe the characteristic of the later Baroque cantata emerging, as composers begin to modify the bass line and alternating recitative and arioso styles in the vocal lines. Amor, giustitia amor, the one work designated “cantata” in Grandi’s third book of Cantade et Arie, published in 1626, which Magnificat will also be performing, already shows considerable variation in the bass line from stanza to stanza and clearly anticipates the more variegated form of the later cantata. The expansion of the stanzas into distinct sections is paralleled in the development of the trio sonata from a free flowing sectional form to a set of individual movements over the course of the 17th Century.

For anyone who cares about 17th-century music, 2010 is without question a Claudio Monteverdi year. The 400th anniversary of the composer’s ground-breaking and magisterial Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers for the Blessed Virgin) of 1610 is a ripe occasion to program the sacred masterpiece of an artist deemed “the creator of modern music” by scholar Leo Schrade.

It’s an opportunity that Magnificat Baroque wasn’t about to miss. The Bay Area ensemble concludes its 18th season with an April 23-25 slate of Vespers concerts.

But before they get there, the troupe is embarked on an unusual and revealing side-trip through Monteverdi territory, with the composer’s lesser-known Venetian contemporary Alessandro Grandi as the destination. To make this journey even more enticing, Magnificat is offering a striking historical contrast to the well-known Vespers: The Feb. 12-14 Grandi programs feature what may well be modern premieres of some of the first self-identified cantatas ever written. The feat has generated considerable interest around the early-music world.

More important, these concerts figure to be an alluring discovery for audiences. In addition to the short solo cantatas on the program, performed by soprano Laura Heimes, Magnificat’s trio of Celeste fiori concerts will include assorted Grandi madrigals and motets, as well as instrumental music published at the time the composer lived in Venice.

Like other fine composers doomed to live in the long shadow of a game-changing genius (think Salieri), Grandi has remained a dim figure. “His main problem, ” said Magnificat Artistic Director Warren Stewart by phone, “is the understandable tendency of musical historians to look first at towering figures when they’re rediscovering a period. So the natural focus in early-17th-century Italian music was Monteverdi.” Stewart spoke from Washington, D.C., where he had just attended a Vespers performance at the National Gallery of Art — the second account of the work that week in the city. The towering figures do go on towering.

Grandi, 10 to 15 years younger than Monteverdi, “was talented and prolific before he got to Venice and on an upward career trajectory,” said Stewart. It was there that his and his more illustrious contemporary’s paths crossed, at San Marco Cathedral. In the city’s most important church, Grandi quickly ascended the ranks to become vice maestro to Monteverdi.

According to Steven Saunders, a professor of music at Maine’s Colby College, “evidence suggests that Grandi’s rise in stature under these conditions may have occasioned resistance and event resentment” by Monteverdi, who considered moving back to Mantua. Seen this way, it’s the older Monteverdi who’s cast as the Salieri figure, with Grandi as the fast-rising and threatening Mozart of his day. But fate, not to mention the fact of Monteverdi’s indisputable singularity, had a different hand to deal. After a decade in Venice, Grandi moved on to Bergamo in 1627 and died there in a devastating plague three years later. Monteverdi survived for another 13 years.

Doing Grandi in a Monteverdi year was “a very conscious decision,” said Stewart, who argues that the younger composer’s strophic bass cantatas “employ a variation technique that was immediately imitated by many other Venetian composers, including Monteverdi, in the 1620s.” Citing Grandi’s “very clear tonal sense,” “modern-sounding harmonies,” and a “buoyant and confident musical architecture,” Stewart made a case for even broader influence. “Clearly, [Heinrich] Schutz [German, 1585-1672] learned a lot from Grandi,” he said.

The cantatas on the Magnificat program vary in length from three to six minutes. Brief as they may be, their importance, according to Jeffrey Kurtzman, general editor of a forthcoming complete Grandi edition, “lies in the very first use of the word cantata in a music publication. The multi-sectional structure of these solo pieces lays the groundwork for sectional organization of the later solo cantata.” Over a repeated continuo bass figure, different vocal melodies, or strophic variations, yield different emphases, cadences, and emotional impact.

Apparently lost in the general neglect of the early Baroque, the pieces survived in manuscripts that had a perilous history of their own. First published in 1620, Grandi’s Cantade et arie a voce sola survived into the 20th century, as far as musicologists knew, only in a copy at Breslau’s University Library. In the Russian siege of that German city in 1945, the library was hit and some of the music collection set on fire. The Grandi collection was not among those works librarians managed to save by tossing them into an adjacent river. A largely impenetrable transcription of the manuscript, by the musicologist Alfred Einstein, remained at Smith College in Massachusetts.

That appeared to be the end of the trail until 2008, when a copy of Grandi’s published cantatas and other solo vocal works came to light from a huge private collection in Spain. Dinko Fabris, an Italian scholar and lute player, explained the discovery in a message to the Society for Seventeenth-Century Music.

“Some twenty years ago,” recalled Fabris, “I visited for the first time in Seville my good friend Señor Rodrigo de Zayas and I saw in his marvelous private library (30,000 volumes), among other treasures, the only surviving copy of the [Grandi] book.” Respecting his “obligations to the discretion” of the collector, Fabris kept silent. Many years later, after moving to Madrid, de Zayas decided to authorize publication of an edition by the Royaumont Foundation in France. A modern-day Grandi “premiere” concert was mounted in Royaumont in fall 2008.

The three cantatas and two other “new” Grandi vocal works on the February program here came to Magnificat from a transcription prepared by a Ph.D. student in Rome, Giulia Giovani, of yet another scholar, Agostino Ziino, who apparently knew of the Spanish collection’s Grandi treasure even before Fabris. Kurtzman, who is a Magnificat advisory board member as well the Grandi edition editor, served as the conduit.

One way or another, some four centuries later, Grandi was destined to find his way back into live performance. Pleased as he is to be a newsmaker, Stewart is just as excited — probably more so — to give the full range of Grandi’s music the attention it deserves. After a pretty thorough discussion of Grandi by phone, the Magnificat director kept thinking of more things he wanted to say about the composer.

In an effusive e-mail, Stewart limned Grandi’s originality and innovations. “He was among the first to include violins in solo vocal music, specifically in his motets. He integrated the violins (always a pair) in a variety of ways — with ritornelli as well as in more thorough-going dialogue with the voice.” The violin writing in the motets, Stewart added, “is fluid and idiomatic” and undoubtedly responsive to “the talented instrumentalists with whom he worked at San Marco.”

Being all but for forgotten for 400 years, it seems, has its own rewards. The pleasures of rediscovery are all that much keener.

In 1620 Alessandro Grandi, published a second edition of his ground-breaking Cantade et Arie a voce sola.  The first edition has long been lost. The importance of this collection of secular pieces lies in the very first use of the word “cantata” in a music publication.  The multi-sectional structure of these solo pieces lays the groundwork for the sectional organization of the later solo cantata.

The only known copy of the 1620 publication resided in the music division of the University Library in Breslau, Germany until the final months of World War II. As the Russians laid siege to Breslau, a bombardment that lasted three months in early 1945, the building housing the music division was hit and caught on fire.  Library personnel saved much of the music collection by throwing it into the surrounding river (the building with the music division lies on an island), but some very important items, including the Grandi Cantade et Arie of 1620 were lost. The only record of the music then lay in an old, difficult-to-read manuscript transcription by the musicologist Alfred Einstein, which is housed in the Music Library at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

What was unknown to musicologists with the exception of Agostino Ziino, and later, Dinko Fabris, was that another copy survived in the private collection of Rodrigo de Zayas in Seville. However, de Zayas has recently provided copies of his print to the Royaumont Foundation in France with permission to Aurelio Bianco of the Université de Tours in France to make an edition, and to Giulia Giovani, a student working on her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Rome under Professor Ziino.

Magnificat is grateful to the cooperation of all these musicologists in making our performances of this music possible. We will be performing from transciptions provided by Bianco and Giovani of the cantatas  Amor altri si duol, Vanne vattene Amor and Udito han pur i Dei as well as two madrigals O Bella Catatrice and Un Cerchietto d’oro. We will also perform one cantata in Grandi third book of Arie et Cantade from 1626, Amor, giustitia Amor. With the exception of the cantata Amor, altri si duol, these works will in all probability be receiving their first performances since the 17th century, and certainly their first North American performances, in Magnificat’s concerts.

Soprano Laura Heimes

At Magnificat’s concerts on February 12-14 Bay Area audiences will have the opportunity to hear the first performances since the 17th century of five vocal works by Alessandro Grandi, including the first three pieces identified by a composer as “cantatas”. Soprano Laura Heimes will join with David Tayler and Hanneke van Proosdij for what will most likely be the first performances of these works in modern times.[1. News of our upcoming performances has created a buzz among musicologists studying the music of the 17th century and we have been informed that one of the cantatas, Amor, altri si duol, was in fact performed at the Bibliothèque musicale François-Lang in Royaumont, France on October 12, 2008. It is, of course, impossible to determine with complete certainty that the other works have not received a public performance and if we hear of any others, we will update this post.]

In his 1620 collection Cantade et Arie, Grandi used to the term “cantada” to distinguish three settings of strophic poetry for soprano and continuo. Each of the works – Amor altri si duol, Vanne vattene Amor and Udito han pur i Dei – employs a compositional strategy identified by musicologists as “strophic bass” cantatas, an example of strophic variation with which many composers were experimenting at the time.

Sadly, the only copy of Grandi’s historic 1620 collection thought to survive into the 20th century was destroyed in the Second World War. Prior to the war several scholars had written about the works, though it is unlikely that any were ever performed. However, Roman musicologist Giulia Giovani has recently transcribed another copy of the print found in a large collection of 16th and 17th century music from the music scholar Godfrey Arkwright that was purchased by a Spanish collector at an auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1939.

With the help of Magnificat Advisory Board member Jeffrey Kurtzman, we were able to contact Giovani, who has graciously offered to make her transcriptions of the three cantatas available for Magnificat’s performances, along with two arias from the same collection.

The distinguishing characteristic of these “cantatas” is the variation of the vocal line for each strophe of the poem over repeating bass lines. The norm in the early 17th century, and in song forms throughout the centuries, was to repeat the same music for each strophe, or verse, of a regularly repeating poetic form. In all ages performers have taken the opportunity presented by such a form to embellish and improvise the each verse. The strophic variation is merely a formalalization of that inherent implulse. Already in the strophic songs set by Caccini and in Monteverdi’s first opera Orfeo (c.f. Possente spirto), we see the principle of strophic variation at work.

Grandi’s association of the word cantata with this straight forward compositional strategy, likely in imitation of improvisatory performance practice, generated immediate imitation and proved to be very successful financially. His four collections of secular songs, as well as those of his solo motets, sold briskly and were reprinted numerous times in the 1620s and publications in the style by other Venetian composers began appearing within months of the release of Grandi’s Cantade et Arie.

We tend to see Monteverdi as the extraordinary genius he was, in whose shadow Grandi labored in obscurity. In reality, at least in the first years of the 1620s, it was the younger Grandi that was scoring on the bestseller lists. Following his arrival at San Marco from Ferrara in 1617, Grandi had risen swiftly through the ranks, quickly becoming capo of the Company of St. Mark’s and soon after gaining promotion to the role of vice maestro to Monteverdi. As Steven Saunders notes in his biographical essay on Grandi, “evidence suggests that Grandi’s rise in stature under these conditions may have occasioned resistance and even resentment” on the part of the elder Monteverdi, who was rumored to be considering a move back to Mantua around this time. The remarkable commercial success of Grandi’s publications and his association with the new and extremely popular genre of solo song must have intensified this resentment.

Within a few years of the first prints of Grandi’s first book of Cantade et Arie, strophic bass cantatas had been published by Giovanni Pietro Berti, Carlo Milanuzzi and Monteverdi himself. The term cantata soon expanded to include a wide range of compositional techniques and by the 1630s the focus of cantata composition had moved to Rome and began to take on the sectional, often narrative form featuring the alternation of recitative and aria associated with the cantata of the later Baroque.

Soprano Laura Heimes

Magnificat’s February 12-14 concerts will feature soprano Laura Heimes in a recital of songs, cantatas and motets by Alessandro Grandi. Laura most recently sang with Magnificat in a program of Charpentier divertissements in October 2008. Her first appearances with Magnificat were in September 2005 in a program featuring setting’s of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido.

Magnificat audience’s will especially remember her captivating performances in the title role of Stradella’s La Susanna in 2007. The San Francisco Classical Voice described her performance and the audience’s response in glowing terms:

“Soprano Laura Heimes alone was worth the price of a ticket. Her clear, expressive sound often soared beautifully above the ensemble. Her performance of the oratorio’s best number, “Da chi spero aita, O Cieli,” elicited spontaneous applause from at least one audience member (it could have been a touchdown). Stradella used a lamento bassline for this pivotal dramatic point of the oratorio…”

Praised elsewhere for her “sparkle and humor, radiance and magnetism” and hailed for “a voice equally velvety up and down the registers,” Laura is widely regarded as an artist of great versatility, with repertoire ranging from the Renaissance to the 21st century. She has collaborated with many of the leading figures in early music, including Andrew Lawrence King, Julianne Baird, Tempeste di Mare, The King’s Noyse, Paul O’Dette, Chatham Baroque, Apollo’s Fire, The New York Collegium, The Publick Musick, Brandywine Baroque, Trinity Consort, and Piffaro.

Laura has been heard at the Boston, Connecticut and Indianapolis Early Music Festivals, at the Oregon and Philadelphia Bach Festivals under the baton of Helmuth Rilling, at the Carmel Bach Festival under Bruno Weil, and in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil in concerts of Bach and Handel. With the Philadelphia Orchestra she appeared as Mrs. Nordstrom in Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music.

Recent recordings featuring Laura include Cantatas Françoises (music of Jacquet de la Guerre and Clérambault) Handel Duets and Trios; Oh! the Sweet Delights of Love: the songs of Purcell with Brandywine Baroque; The Lass with the Delicate Air: English Songs from the London Pleasure Gardens; The Jane Austen Songbook with Julianne Baird; and Caldara’s Il Giuoco del Quadriglio with Julianne Baird and the Queen’s Chamber Band conducted by Stephen Altop.

For more about Laura Heimes visit her website LauraHeimes.com.

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