Rare Italian instrumental music

It would be a great enough pleasure to receive for review a batch of CDs which contained just one disc of unfamiliar Baroque instrumental music whose excellence made it worthy to stand beside that of the best contemporary composers; for no fewer than five to turn up at once is truly a cause for critical jubilation. The pleasure is even greater when the performances are of equal excellence—not only technically accomplished, but fully imbued with that irresistible combination of energy, enthusiasm and elegance which, by doing the music the fullest possible justice, is virtually guaranteed to win it the enthusiastic following—hopefully among performers as well as listeners—which will enable it to secure a foothold in an extremely crowded marketplace.

Giovanni Lorenzo Gregori's Concerti a più stromenti, op.2, which take up the lion's share of Capriccio Basel's Gregori & Stradella: Concerti grossi (Capriccio SACD 71 091, rec 2005, 64'), would seem to be a particularly rewarding quarry for ensembles in search of interesting new repertory. The collection was published in 1698, the same year as Torelli's op.6 concertos; its title may in fact be the first occasion when the term 'concerto grosso' appeared in print. If so, it was actually coined by a composer not from Bologna, that forcing-house of the development of the instrumental concerto, but from Lucca, some 130 kilometres to the south-west. Although Gregori describes the pieces as being for 'due violini concertati, con i ripieni', the solo passages are usually of the briefest, often merely repeating what has gone immediately before as a kind of echo effect. They are all on a very small scale, between 3 and 5 minutes long, but each one is a gem; a perfectly formed miniature concerto which, within its brief span, displays an astonishing richness of imaginative invention. Most follow the standard slow-fast-slow-fast pattern, but no.6 in A minor has only three movements, the central slow one bringing the continuo organ into the limelight with a charming little solo, while the concluding Allegro, with its persistent dotted rhythms, provides an excellent example of Gregori's penchant for abrupt pauses—one of a number of stylistic idiosyncracies which give his music an intriguingly individual flavour, as well as an attractive touch of drama. Concerto no.7 in E contains similarly unexpected tonal twists in the shape of the minor interlude which interrupts the particularly forth-right first Allegro, and the sudden change to the minor at the end of the following slow movement. The fourth concerto, in A, confounds listeners' expectations in a different way by replacing the expected fast finale with a Largo. Gregori's slow movements are indeed remarkably varied, from the grand and solemn to the graceful and leisured, or the plangently expressive. Fast movements are equally varied, and also coherently organized, and, in Capriccio Basel's scintillating performances, really fizz with energy. This is music which is not only of great historical importance and fascination for the light it throws on the early development of the concerto but is also, quite simply, enormous fun to listen to.

Francesco Manfredini is a much more familiar figure than Gregori, though much of his fame rests on a single piece, the charming Pastorale per il Santissimo Natale which concludes Les Amis de Philippe's Manfredini: 12 concerti op.3 (CPO 999 638-2, rec 1988-9, 78'). A native of Pistoia, not all that far from Gregori's home town of Lucca, he studied with Torelli and spent much of the earlier part of his career in Bologna. Published in 1718, these concertos show just how far the form had come in the 20 years after Gregori's volume appeared, especially where the development of distinctive solo parts is concerned. The collection is divided into three groups of four: ripieno concertos, and those with either one or two solo violins. The amount of independence given to the soloist in those for one violin, and the part's technical demands, vary considerably. In the first Allegro of no.5 in D minor the soloist is so closely integrated into...