Carlo ARRIGONI (1697-1744)
Tiranni affetti
Sonata for Mandolin and continuo in D [7:19]
Sonata for Mandolin and continuo in E minor [10:43]
Sonata for Mandolin and continuo in E minor [6:53]
Cervetta amorosa [8:40]
Perdona o cara amorosetta Fille [8:00]
Dir ch’io non deggia piangere [6:25]
Infranti I ceppi del cieco amore [3:14]
Lusinga il pensier mio [4:22]
Scherza innocente gregge [3:59]
Davide Ferella (mandolin)
Marta Fumagalli (mezzo-soprano)
Accademia degli Erranti
rec. 2019, Pieve della Formigola, Corticelle, Italy
DYNAMIC CDS7878 [59:46]
Born in Florence, Carlo Arrigoni was a lutenist who first came to attention as a composer in 1719 with his oratorio L’innocenza di S. Eufemia scoperta nei tradimento and an opera, La vedova in 1722. Between 1731 and 1736 he was in London working with the “Opera of the Nobility” which had been set up to counter the huge success of Handel’s opera company. Despite originally being associated with the anti-Handel brigade, Arrigoni went on to work alongside Handel on several occasions, most notably playing a significant role in a Covent Garden concert directed by Handel on 19th February 1736 in which he not only played the lute in the first performances of Handel’s Concerto op.4, no.6 (now thought of as a concerto for organ or harp, but quite possibly first performed as a lute concerto), participated in the first performance of Alexander’s Feast in February and singing the tenor part in Handel’s duo cantata Cecilia, volgi un sguardo. Later that year Arrigoni returned to Florence to take up an appointment in the court chapel of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. For all his amazing versatility as a performer and despite the popularity of his music, which was performed in various European centres during his lifetime, Arrigoni seems to have been almost wholly forgotten after his death in Florence at the age of 46, and until Winton Dean wrote an intriguing article on him for The Musical Times in 1977, most history books either mentioned him merely in footnotes or confused him with one of his sons, who was a gifted performer who seems to have spent much of his professional life in the British Isles (and is listed among the performers in the Three Choirs Festival at Hereford in 1756). As a composer, Arrigoni’s extant output was small, comprising four operas, three oratorios, a handful of cantatas and around half a dozen instrumental sonatas. The entry on him in the New Grove suggests, rather sniffily, that his “relative success as a composer was due to his mastery of fashionable stylistic conventions rather than to the real worth of his music”. But Davide Farella has been working hard unearthing forgotten manuscripts, including many of the works recorded here, and is rather more convinced of Arrigoni’s creative abilities, writing in his booklet note; “Arrigoni admirably blends different styles and influences in his output, which makes his works never sound banal but…extremely convincing”. You pays your money and you takes your choice, but at least, instead of isolated fragments of his music included on discs focusing largely on more famous composers of the age, we now have an extended body of audio evidence from which to assess these rival claims on Arrigoni’s stature as a composer.
Other recordings of Arrigoni’s music pair it with Vivaldi, but apart from the fact that the two men were born and lived in independent states which have subsequently become part of a unified Italy, there is no connection either musical or stylistic between them; any similarities one might be tempted to identify between them are purely coincidental. The three concertos recorded here are in the four-movement form, rather than the three-movement one perfected by Vivaldi, and if there is a clear musical influence over them, it seems to come more from Corelli and, especially in the Mandolin Sonata in D, Handel. Many of Handel’s mannerisms can be discerned here as well as some almost Handelian melodies, notably in the opening Grave and the jaunty Giga, in which Ferella executes a superbly athletic final cadence while the other members of Accademia degli Erranti skip along cheerfully underneath. The E minor concerto, which has found a place in the repertory of mandolinists, includes, in the first of its Allegro movements, some natty little echo effects and, with a preponderance of sequences, is perhaps the most Vivalidan music here. It is also the most virtuoso of the concertos with soaring mandolin scales in the first of the two Allegro movements, and Ferella’s true virtuosity is revealed in the glittering mandolin figurations of the set of variations which constitute the Concerto’s final movement. A stately adagio which here seems rather more animated than that tempo marking might imply, provides a pleasing interlude between these two outbursts of frenetic display. The double concerto for mandolin and violin opens with an improvisatory conversation between mandolin and violin, and continues into a light-footed Canzona, an elegantly stepping Courante adagio (with, again, in this performance a very liberal view taken of the word Adagio) and ending with a solemn Giga. Violinist Barbara Altobello keeps close to Ferella’s footsteps in this most conversational and, at times, intimately interwoven music.
It appears that Arrigoni spent some of 1737 and possibly 1738 in Vienna where he wrote a number of vocal works for the Austrian court, including the solo cantatas and arias recorded here (which are the works to which the rather expansive description on the disc’s cover of “World Premiere Recording” applies). Fresh from his English sojourn, Arrigoni has clearly been deeply influenced by Handel, and while none of the arias boasts either the strong sense of characterisation or melodic memorableness of Handel, there is some justification in these for the disc’s overall title (a title which seems inappropriate so far as the innocuous music of the concertos is concerned).
The first of the two cantatas recorded here, Cervetta amorosa, opens with an aria commenting on the “innocent love” of the shepherdess Silvia, and a further aria is full of mock anger as “the ungrateful girl refuses to yield to my love”. Marta Fumagalli exudes, in a full-bodied voice with beautifully clear diction, joy, wit and unalloyed happiness, and with the dancing cello of Claudia Poz adding humour to the arias and the archlute of Diego Cantalupi providing an elaborate decoration to the recitative, all neatly underpinned by the keyboard continuo work of Gabriele Levi, this is a work which certainly supports Ferella’s claim that Arrigoni, fresh from his London experiences, brilliantly evokes “alluring and suggestive sound universes”. The other cantata, Perdona o cara amorosella Fille, is a rather more staid and uneventful affair, which despite a charming obligato cello part in the Aria “Mira là quell’angue ascoso” and Fumagalli’s wonderfully mellifluous ornamentations, offers little in the way of a clear musical personality.
Interspersing the concertos and cantatas are four stand-alone arias for voice and violin. These are conversations rather than duets, with the violin setting the mood and providing a bridge between verses, while the vocal line presents the text accompanied by the continuo; violin and voice never combine. Arrigoni is not given to expansive gestures or lavish melodic development, but he shows a deft hand at reaching into the heart of the text in his concise writing. The best of these are the light-hearted Infranti I ceppi del cieco amore and, at the other end of the emotional scale, the plaintive Dir ch’io non deggia piangere, from the text of which the disc’s overall title is adopted.
I remain unconvinced that Carlo Arrigoni is a forgotten genius, but there is enough in his music for committed and inventive performers to sink their teeth into, and Accademia degli Erranti, a newly-formed early music group which specialises in rediscovering music and composers “that are not known to the public”, present through their splendidly manicured performances a pretty convincing case for this music. In both Davide Ferella and Marta Fumagalli, they have outstanding soloists who exert a great deal of authority and individual personality on these performances, bringing this forgotten corner of the early 18th century very much to life.
Marc Rochester
