The concert of Saturday, October 21, is underwritten in part by a generous gift from Mr. and Mrs. Mark Holly.
This weekend’s concerts are presented by UBS.

Italian Spirit
BY PAUL SCHIAVO 

For centuries, Italy has enjoyed a reputation as a fount of music. Small wonder, for Italian composers have been in the forefront of a number of important musical developments since the 16th century. It was in Italy, during the 1500s, that the Renaissance style reached its culmination in the complex and beautifully wrought compositions of Palestrina and other composers. It was in Italy that two forms of secular music--opera and the orchestral concerto--emerged as vehicles for the most innovative ideas in composition during the Baroque period. It was in Italy that virtuoso violin playing arose and served as a model for performers on other instruments. Our concert presents music by Italian composers of the Renaissance and Baroque periods, and also by two northern admirers who were, in very different ways, influenced by Italian musical ideals.

Music has flourished in many parts of Italy, but one city was particularly important as a musical center during the Renaissance and Baroque eras. This was Venice, whose best‑known monument is the domed Cathedral of San Marco. The cathedral has been a musical as well as religious center, and its remarkable architecture strongly affected the character of Venetian composition. In the late 15th century, a second organ was installed opposite and facing the original one. This arrangement led to the practice of stationing around each organ separate choirs and instrumental groups that could sound in alternation across the vast spaces within the church. The resulting antiphony, to use the musical term describing dialogues between ensembles, became a hallmark of Venetian music.

The foremost Venetian composer during the city’s first great musical flowering, around 1600, was Giovanni Gabrieli, who was organist at San Marco from 1585 until his death in 1612. His “Canzon Septimi Toni”--“Piece in the Seventh Mode”--which opens our program, is from a collection entitled Sacrae Symphoniae published in 1597. It reveals the attractive features of Gabrieli’s style. Alternating phrases between instrumental groups reflect the antiphonal arrangement of music in San Marco. Dance rhythms predominate, and the writing moves from strong unison rhythms to florid counterpoint and back again, creating a stirring effect as the individual lines converge in clear, straightforward harmonies.

Italy has produced many famous composers, and one who might well be described as infamous. Born to a noble family, Carlo Gesualdo was heir to the title Prince of Venosa, one of the highest ranks of the Italian aristocracy. He married his cousin when he was only 16, but theirs proved an unhappy union. In 1590, four years after their wedding, Gesualdo discovered his wife in bed with another Italian nobleman and killed them both in a jealous rage. His aristocratic standing and the circumstance surrounding the murder prevented criminal prosecution, but the resulting scandal prompted Gesualdo to retire to his estate. During the remainder of his life, Gesualdo grew increasingly melancholy and reclusive. His only pleasure, it seems, was music, for which he developed an obsessive passion.

Gesualdo composed a substantial body of vocal music. This includes some sacred songs and litanies, but his most important work is his many madrigals, songs for several voices based on secular poetry. Gesualdo’s early madrigals are fairly conventional--or, at least, not too very unconventional. But over time his composing grew ever more unusual, with odd and angular melodic contours, irregular phrase lengths, and eccentric harmonies. This last quality was remarked by Gesualdo’s contemporaries, one of whom noted that the prince’s compositions “do not avoid harshness, nor shun dissonance itself.”

It is not surprising that Gesualdo’s highly original approach to harmony should have attracted the attention of a number of 20th-century composers, who also were seeking to free themselves from harmonic conventions. One of those composers was Igor Stravinsky, who praised Gesualdo as “one of the most personal and most original composers ever born.”

Stravinsky had a fertile relation with the music of past centuries--we shall hear another instance of this at the conclusion of our concert--and in 1960, to mark the 400th anniversary of Gesualdo’s birth, he arranged three of the prince’s madrigals for small orchestra. Monumentum pro Gesualdo di Venosa ad CD annum is more than just an orchestration of music originally written for voices. Particularly in the first madrigal, “Asciugate i begli occhi,” Stravinsky freely altered Gesualdo’s composition to avoid symmetrical phrasing and harmonic repetition. But throughout the work--even in the second and third madrigals, where he did little to alter the original lines and rhythms--his very personal manner of instrumentation has the effect of bringing this old Italian music into the modern era.

Italy retained its musical pre-eminence for more than a century after Gabrieli and Gesualdo were active, reaching a new plateau of importance in the early 18th century. The most important Italian composer of that time was Antonio Vivaldi, active chiefly in Venice. Vivaldi is well known today through his instrumental music, especially the popular quartet of violin concertos known as “The Four Seasons.” His sacred music remains less familiar to the listening public. Still, this repertory is not as obscure as it once was. Nearly all of Vivaldi’s church music lay unknown and unsuspected until the 1920s, when the dramatic discovery of a large cache of 18th-century manuscripts in an Italian monastery brought hundreds of his works to light. Among the compositions recovered through this lucky find was the setting of the hymn Stabat Mater.

Written in the 13th-century, the Stabat Mater text offers a meditation on the suffering of Christ’s mother as she witnesses the crucifixion of her Son. It is the most sorrowful of all major Christian litanies, and it traditionally calls for music of poignant character. Vivaldi fulfills this requirement admirably. In different ways throughout the work, minor-key harmonies, suspended dissonances (whose notes seem to strain against each other), and descending melody lines combine to convey a doleful spirit.

Vivaldi cast this piece as a solo cantata for alto voice and string orchestra, set in nine brief movements. These yield an unusual structure, in that the music of the first three movements returns in sequence, movements 1 through 3 repeating with different verses as movements 4 through 6. Whereas the central movements reprise the opening portion of the composition, the last three movements bring new music. Vivaldi’s settings of the verses beginning “Eia mater, fons amoris” and also “Fac, ut ardeat cor meum” show his penchant for obsessively reiterating accompaniment patterns. Above these, the vocalist spins exquisite lines whose winsome contours do not preclude occasional surprising turns of harmony. The composition concludes with a contrapuntal “Amen.”

Vivaldi was renowned in his lifetime not only as a composer but also as a virtuoso violinist. In this he was hardly alone. A school of violinist-composers dominated Italian music for more than a hundred years, beginning in the second half of the 17th century. Among its members were, in addition to Vivaldi, Arcangelo Corelli, Giuseppi Tartini, Francesco Geminiani, and Pietro Locatelli, from whom we hear now.

Born in the northern Italian town of Bergamo in 1695, Locatelli had mastered the violin sufficiently to be receiving professional engagements by the time he turned 15. A year later, in 1711, he left for Rome, where he remained over a decade, establishing himself as one of the foremost violinists in a city famous for such musicians. Eventually he embarked on a career as a touring virtuoso that took him as far as Dresden, Berlin, and Amsterdam.

In 1731, Locatelli published a set of six short pieces, each titled Introduzione teatrale. That term implies, of course, an overture to an opera or play. Locatelli never composed for the theater--all his works are concert pieces featuring violin or string orchestra--but his “theatrical introductions” conform to the manner of the opera overtures Italian composers of his day regularly produced. Typically, each is in three sections forming a fast-slow-fast pattern. We hear the first piece in the set, which serves well as an overture to the second half of our concert.

Music by George Frideric Handel might seem, on casual consideration, out of place in a concert devoted to music of Italy. Not so. German by birth and English by emigration, Handel was nevertheless one of the foremost composers of Italian opera during the late Baroque period. He had learned the style and conventions of the genre during a four‑year sojourn in Italy, and he perfected them in a series of operas he wrote for London, Italian opera having been a fashionable entertainment among the English aristocracy in the early part of the 18th century.

In London, Handel could make use of the vocal artistry of a remarkable performer, the castrato Francesco Bernardi. Better known by his stage name, Senesino, he was the most famous of a number of male singers who retained their pre-pubescent vocal range through surgical intervention. Indeed, he enjoyed a kind of celebrity that today is reserved for rock stars. The nobility of London vied for his attention. His vocal artistry was repeatedly extolled in the press and in letters, as was his demeanor. “His countenance was well adapted to the stage,” wrote one admirer, “and his action was natural and noble. To these qualities he joined a majestic figure.” Offstage, he played the part of a star, being by many reports vain and demanding. Those narcissistic qualities eventually led to a breach with Handel, but not before the composer had written many operas featuring Senesino’s extraordinary voice.

Castrati are now a vanished species, their loss compensated by the revival of countertenor singing (by constitutionally whole men using falsetto voice), which has given us a more than satisfactory substitute. Performers such as David Daniels allow us to hear Handel’s music much as it sounded when sung by Senesino. We hear three arias the composer wrote for his famous leading man.

 The first is from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, arguably the greatest of all Handel’s operas. Composed in 1724, this work treats the Roman emperor Julius Caesar’s love affair with the Egyptian queen Cleopatra. Their romance takes place amidst a power struggle for the throne of Egypt, with Cleopatra pitted against her brother, Ptolemy. Caesar and Ptolemy first meet at a banquet, where each senses the other as an enemy. After Ptolemy subtly threatens him, Caesar replies, singing that he will be ready for any move Ptolemy makes against him. The important horn solos that accompany this aria are an unusual and effective touch.

Rodelinda, completed in 1725, concerns a struggle for the throne of the northern-Italian province of Lombardy. Bertarido, the rightful ruler, has been usurped and forced into exile. But he returns to Milan in disguise, seeking not only his throne but reunion with his wife, Rodelinda. In the opera’s first act, Bertarido rues his downfall and sings of his longing for his spouse in the recitative and aria “Pompe vane . . . Dove sei?”