Il Giardino de Giulio Caccini

Album review

Before the 1990s, Italian composer Giulio Caccini was known only to experts in the field of early seventeenth century music; he was a shadowy figure from the earliest days of opera whose work was scattered and little known even to scholars. Caccini was one of the first composers to promote the idea that a melody line, sung by a single voice with a well-played accompaniment, was sufficient to convey a deep musical experience, and his work in this vein ultimately influenced the whole idea of opera. In 1994 Latvian soprano Inessa Galante recorded a contemporary arrangement of Caccini's Ave Maria that became a sleeper hit on the classical charts, and her version was followed by those of Lesley Garrett and others, particularly that of Charlotte Church, which moved Caccini onto the pop charts for the first time. While Caccini's lovely, ear-catching melodies, even in arranged form, can be intoxicating, what would be the fate of his music once presented in something resembling its original context? Would it be obscured by the whine of a viol, or otherwise destroyed by a singer using a full-on operatic voice?
No doubt this has occurred somewhere along the line, but not on Alpha Productions' Il Giardino di Giulio Caccini, a collection of his songs interleaved with a selected few from his contemporaries and performed by singers Marko Horvat and Olga Pitarch. Horvat is the primary artist here, singing along with his own accompaniment on lute, theorbo, Baroque guitar, and other period instruments. Pitarch occasionally jumps in on numbers better suited to female voices, and joins Horvat on Francesca Caccini's unusual duet, Io mi distruggo. Horvat studied singing in India, where the stuttering vocal ornaments germane to early seventeenth century Italian singing are still in use. He does not employ very much of a vibrato, appropriate given the idiom of Caccini's music and the undeniably secular subjects of his texts. It was pop music then, and it is still pop music today, thanks to Horvat and his group's light-handed approach to it. The continuo accompaniment, employed only here and there, is always tasteful and lively. Otherwise, these songs work just fine with Horvat and Pitarch providing their own accompaniment.
Il Giardino di Giulio Caccini is a highly enjoyable and entertaining collection, with loads of catchy songs that are engaging and fun. These alternate with sadder and more sentimental fare that incorporates the hair-raising bitterness stemming from the rather dissonant harmonic practices of Caccini's time, which was dominated by the influence of Claudio Monteverdi.
For someone looking for Caccini outside the realm of opera, or even that of the "Ave Maria," one cannot imagine a better place to go than Alpha Productions' Il Giardino di Giulio Caccini.

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