Leonarda: A Portrait of Isabella Leonarda

Album review

Highlights from the varied output of a prolific female 17th-century composer.

Born into a noble family and baptized as Anna Isabella Leonardi on 6 Sept. 1620, she belonged to one of the most illustrious families of Novara. She studied at home before entering the Congregazione delle Vergini di S. Orsola at age 16. She took her vows three years later and remained in this convent until her death on February 25, 1704, at the age of 84. During her long life, Isabella served in all capacities: mater discreta et cancellaria, magistra musicae, superiora, and finally consigliera. She was clearly a woman of robust constitution and an iron will. She evidently showed musical promise from an early age, further nurtured within the convent, as the first of her published collections of music dates from as early as 1640, when she was just 20 years old.

Another 15 such collections followed over the course of her long and industrious life: Masses, psalms, Magnificats, responsories, hymns, antiphons and litanies) as well as non-liturgical pieces. In her own time, Isabella’s music was prized by connoisseurs: according to one French collector, ‘All the works of this illustrious and incomparable Isabella Leonarda are so beautiful, so charming, so brilliant, and at the same time so knowledgeable and so wise ... that my great regret is not to have them all’.

This recording provides a portrait of Isabella Leonarda’s vast and varied output, ranging from solo motets to a large-scale Psalm setting for voices, obbligato violins and basso continuo. O flammae is a highly expressive and sensual solo motet involving daring chromaticism and far-ranging tonalities. Numerous works exemplify her “concertato” writing in their alternation of meter, tempo and texture between florid soloistic passages and more homophonic choral treatment. The absence of male voices is solved by the transposition of lower voices or the use of instruments.

Previous recordings of the brilliant Salve Regina, scored for tenor, violins and continuo, have employed a male voice, whereas the all-female Capella Artemisia takes the kind of imaginative approach to performance that Isabella would have devised for herself in the convent out of necessity, where lower vocal parts would have been either transposed up or played on instruments. The album opens and closes with a pair of her most splendid and exuberant concerted liturgical works, Gloriosa Mater Domini and Dixit Dominus.

As a whole, the album should open many ears to an overlooked but major figure of 18th-century sacred music. It should invite the same warm critical reception given to the previous releases of Capella Artemisia on Brilliant Classics. © Brilliant Classics