This
CD is the continuation of viola d’amore specialist Thomas Georgi’s
The
Stockholm Sonatas I (BIS-CD-1535), resurrecting the neglected
music of Attilio Ariosti. The first volume consisted of the
music published by Ariosti in London as a set of ‘Lessons for
the Viola d’Amour’. The works were preserved in Stockholm in
a manuscript entitled ‘Receuil de Pièces’ and copied by the
Swedish composer Johan Helmich Roman in the late 1710s during
his studies in London. Based on the Stockholm manuscript, Georgi
has made his own edition of the works. This recording comprises
the first 7 of the 15 ‘sonatas’ contained in the Receuil, leaving
the remainder for a final, third volume in the series.
Highly
regarded by his contemporaries as a singer, organist, cellist
and dramatist, Ariosti has been more or less forgotten for more
than two centuries. In his liner notes Georgi underlines Ariosti’s
“remarkable twists of harmony, his witty way with silence as
well as with notes, his preference for juxtaposition of contrasting
material over development of a single idea”; wondering if these
qualities would have found him “as wide an audience as Corelli’s”,
had the viola d’amore remained popular as an instrument. As
on the first disc, Georgi is joined by lutenist Lucas Harris,
and this time by different cellist, Mime Yamahiro Brinkmann,
another product of that excellent Early Music Department at
my place of work, the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.
Thomas
Georgi has used the title ‘Sonata’ for these works even though
the word is never used in the manuscript source. “They sound
like sonatas to me” is his almost belligerent declaration, and
I admire his pioneering spirit in cutting through a potential
quagmire of nomenclatural red tape. His expertise and scholarly
research mean that his treatment of embellishments in this music
is based on the historical examples of contemporary performers.
Citing Corelli as a model, the scores are taken as a framework
from which a player of the time would have used partially as
a springboard on which their own technical and expressive abilities
would have had a significant effect with regard to the final
result. In his review of the fist disc of this series, Gary
Higginson describes these works as ‘second-rate music’ – in
which I would agree that they don’t really plumb great emotional
depths to our modern ears. For the purpose that they were no
doubt intended they are however ‘first-rate’, as your gigging
reviewer can confirm. A composer writing to satisfy players
and a mixed audience walks a narrow line between being over-demanding
and dull. Ariosti is neither of these things, providing plenty
of interesting music for all of the musicians involved, enough
wow factor and variety to keep the elderly aunts and uncles
awake in the front row, and keeping enough in reserve not to
annoy the wealthy patrons at the back who are having a boozy
chat through the whole thing. The handkerchief waving bewigged
gentry of the time swooned hopelessly at anything too dissonant
in any case, so Ariosti knew exactly what he was doing with
these works.
Thomas
Georgi’s Viola d’amore has an ‘alto’ pitch range, but while
the general tessitura is lower than a violin, the colour is
in fact quite bright. The strings have a thicker, more throaty
texture in tone, but the overall effect is highly attractive,
and the balance between violoncello and lute, the glue which
links the two, is nicely struck. I note that these have been
recorded in a different acoustic to volume one, but Bis’s reliably
wonderful recording techniques have created another winning
balance between close detail and spaciousness. It may well be
that the CDs from this series end up being used as background
music to chic dinners, but now all those embarrassing pauses
can be filled with at least one sensible question: “…mmm, I
like this music, what is it?”
Dominy Clements
Thomas Georgi
(viola d’amore)
