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GABRIELI
sonate e canzoni
per concertar con l'organo
Concertino Palatino
Bruce Dickey . Charles Toet
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HMA 1951688
Giovanni Gabrieli was without doubt the greatest composer of the Venetian High Renaissance. From the time of his successful audition in 1585 until his death in 1612, Giovanni
Gabrieli held the position of first organist at the basilica of St. Mark’s in Venice, a position he
had taken over from his uncle and teacher, Andrea. In addition, after the death of his uncle
in 1587, Giovanni was the principle composer of ceremonial sacred music at St. Mark’s
and was responsible for finding and hiring extra singers and instrumentalists for major feast
days. The players he had at his disposal, especially the cornettists and trombonists, were
among the best to be found anywhere, and their virtuosity is clearly reflected in the music
he wrote for them. While his sacred concerted music was more influential in the long run,
it is the instru­mental music he wrote for these players which probably reached the highest
art­istic level and has the greatest power to touch modern audiences.
This is an astonishing achievement in a period in which virtually all of the most ‘serious’
music was written for singers. Gabrieli was the first composer to elevate the genres of canzona and sonata to an artistic level equal to the best vocal music of the age. While much
has been made (often erroneously) of Giovanni’s innov­ations (dynamic indications, specified
instrumentations, echo effects, etc.), the truly revolutionary thing about his instrumental
music is not the specific devices he employed, but the astonishing quality that it consistently attains.
All of the ensemble canzonas and sonatas heard on this recording come from Gabrieli’s two
principal printed collections, the Sacrae Symphoniae (1597) and the posthumous Canzoni
e sonate (1615). Although an enormous amount of stylistic and technical development
separates these two collections, the earlier works are already completely unparalleled in their
emotional range, their variety of textures, their use of written-out virtuoso embellishments
and their brilliant manipulation of instrumental color. The later collection develops all these
aspects and adds a new independence of the basso continuo, a more modern approach to
ornamentation and greater freedom from the vocal chanson model. The intricacy of some
of these later canzonas is breathtaking, yet they represent, oddly, the end of a road. No
composer ever took the canzona form beyond where Giovanni had left it. They remain unique
instrumental monuments to a genius of the High Renaissance created at a time when the
currents of fashion were pulling in a differ­ent direction altogether.
Concertar con l’organo
Gabrieli’s sonatas and canzonas have been the subject of substantial scholarship and have
found their way into the standard repertoire of brass ensembles both traditional and ‘authentic’. Despite the enormous progress made in recent years in understanding this music and
its performance, one stubborn obstacle has remained to performing this music as it might
have been played at St. Mark’s: the organs. The English diarist John Evelyn stated that the
cornetto was the instrument which ‘gave life to the organ’, and indeed instrumentalists
normally played on the organ loft or ‘in the organ’ (nell’organo), as the Italians put it. The
en­semble sound was thus a blend of the characteristically sweet timbre of 16th-century
Italian organs with the somewhat more penetrating, though still vocal sounds of cornetti,
violins and trombones.
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gabrieli
Unfortunately, the pair of organs for which St. Mark’s was famous in Gabrieli’s day has
long since perished. The two large organs facing each other from opposite sides of the
choir were described by Banchieri as ‘most perfect’. The traditional ‘first organ’, played by
Giovanni Gabrieli, was the larger of the two, while the somewhat smaller ‘second organ’ was
described as ‘sweeter’ in timbre, indeed as ‘extremely sweet, and even more sweet when
it is played by the best organist found today in our Italy, and this is Giovanni Gabrieli…’ 1
The organs were not at all large, at least compared to instruments north of the Alps, but
were quite typical of north Italian organs of the day. Such instruments, judging both by contemporary descriptions and surviving instruments, were both clear and sweet in tone, and
possessed a remarkably ‘vocal’ quality.
Fortunately, the two magnificent organs in the Basilica of San Petronio in Bologna, restored
between 1974 and 1982, present a direct parallel to the organs of St. Mark’s. The first
organ at St. Mark’s was built in 1489 by Fra Urbano while the older of the two Bolognese
organs was built by Lorenzo da Prato between 1471 and 1475. Both organs had 24’ principals, a single manual and a pull-down pedal. The organ of Fra Urbano had seven ranks while
the Lorenzo da Prato had ten, though this large number of ranks is partly due to its double
prospect with the 24’ principal in the front prospect and a 12’ octave in the rear. The second
organ in San Petronio, built by Baldassarre Malamini in 1596 as a companion to the Lorenzo
da Prato organ, is a 16’ instrument with a double prospect and 10 ranks.
The organs of San Petronio are tuned in 1/4 comma mean tone temperament at a pitch
one half tone above a=440. Though the pitch at St. Mark’s cannot be known with certainty,
indications are that it was very high, and the organs would certainly have been in mean
tone. The two Bolognese instruments together are thus perfectly suited to the double-choir
ensemble music of Giovanni Gabrieli, and the acoustics of San Petronio, while considerably
more reverberant than those of St. Mark’s, seem to us appropriate to this wonderful music
conceived for the mosaic-covered vaults of the Venetian Basilica.
We hope that this recording will help to re-integrate the sound of the Italian 16th-century
organ into our aural image of the ensemble music of Giovanni Gabrieli. We also hope in so
doing that we have brought some new colors and a renewed sense of vocality to music too
often identified with tonal brilliance alone.
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BRUCE DICKEY
1. “soavissimo; e tanto più è soave, quanto viene dal più eccellente organista, c’habbia ogg di la nostra Italia sonata; e questi-è
Giovanni Gabrieli…”
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