Rossi: Toccate & Corrente

Album review

Rather than spending thousands of dollars on a graduate degree in Baroque art, you could just pick up the Alpha label's Baroque music releases as they appear, and then devote an evening a week to studying them closely. Each Alpha recording pairs music, generally by a single composer, with close analysis of a painting from the same period, reproduced both as a whole and in detail. Sometimes thematic connections are clear, but just as often they're completely absent. In the case of this album, both the composer, Michelangelo Rossi, and the artist, Guido Reni, were in the employ of Florence's powerful Barberini family, which had managed to install one of its own as Pope Urban VIII (the patron, one might add, of several of Rome's famous fountains). Yet music and art seem almost to pass in the night here. Rossi's keyboard music, the best-known sector of his mostly obscure output, is centered on the then-new genre of the toccata, the quasi-improvisatory (and sometimes actually improvised) form that was picked up by German composers in a line leading up to the massive fantastic compositions of J.S. Bach. Rossi's works followed closely upon those of the pioneer of the form, Girolamo Frescobaldi, and are strongly influenced by them, turning at times even further in the direction of harmonic extremity. Hear the concluding flourish of the Toccata settima, track 16, for a spectacular example. What had this rather avant-garde instrumental music to do with Reni's very classical painting of the abduction of Helen of Troy? Nothing in the presentation here answers that question, but enough deep background is presented that you can begin to think about it for yourself.
One thing to note for those interested in the music itself is that harpsichordist Sergio Vartolo has recorded much of this same music on a Naxos disc. Naxos' presentation is in every way less ambitious than Alpha's, but Vartolo's readings stand up to those by Jörg-Andreas Bötticher on the present disc. The biggest difference between the two performances comes in the sounds of the harpsichords used; Bötticher's instrument, a copy of a 1681 Italian harpsichord, is a glittering, powerful thing, while Vartolo uses a quieter, much more intimate, murmuring, rather Garrison Keillor-like example. The sound of the Naxos disc is inferior, and another problem is that Vartolo separates out Rossi's toccatas from his short Correntes, simple triple-meter dance pieces with which they are much more logically and pleasingly paired. Sampling both recordings is instructive in itself, but for total immersion in the world of the Italian Baroque, Alpha's disc is, as usual, the way to go.

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