DESCRIPTION:
THE PROJECT.
FRANCESCO VIGNALI's madrigals were found by Vittorio Rizzi at Uppsala, Sweden, in a printed edition dating back to 1640, with the types of the venetian publisher Alessandro Vincenti. The printing, the only existing one - no trace of other editions has been found until today - has no critical edition, unlike the other three collections of the present cd (Marini's opus 1st and 8th and Gussago's Sonatas). This implied that the music needed to be transcribed in modern notation and the texts needed to be understood and studied. The latter task has been carried out by Mr. Rizzi, who was able to ascertain that the composer used verses of, among the others, Ottavio Rinuccini and Torquato Tasso. The former task has been carried out by the undersigned. After two years and and one year after the three 2010 concerts dedicated to the composer, Vignali has been recorded for the first time ever.
The selection of pieces collected for the CD was decided after Mr. Merlo proposed to record and to include some of CESARIO GUSSAGO's works. Moreover, thanks to the adding of BIAGIO MARINI's works, the pieces collected become extremely significant to understand the musical background of the period. At the beginning of the seventeenth century the friar, theologian, and historian Cesario Gussago, coming from Ostiano, not far from Brescia (where he was organist, in Santa Maria delle Grazie Church), gives his Sonatas to a venetian publisher. The pieces consist in counterpoint works written for unspecified instrumental ensemble (wind instruments and strings, together or independently). Venice, together with Mantua, had been one of the two reference points of the emerging baroque music since the first instrumental experiments of the two Gabrieli. This newly born music of instruments needing further developments, together with the "affetti" (affections) issue, draws Marini's attention. The violinist and composer from Brescia brings the pieces selected for the CD to the venetian publisher in 1617 and 1629. Moreover, in the musical field of the time emerged the form of the madrigal, reaching the apex with Monteverdi, who worked both in Mantua and Venice. It is always in Venice that around the half of the century appears the printing of Vignali's madrigals, dedicated to Scipione Gonzaga, Prince of Bozzolo, Marquis of Ostiano and cadet of the Lords of Mantua.
Nowadays, the choice to record a CD of the early baroque period (first half of the seventeenth century) with contemporary instruments as the ones exploited, may seem an offence to the philological research on the sources and on the instruments that has been developing from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. But this is not our case. The main aim of this recording was giving to the pieces selected (some of which had been seldom recorded also with ancient instruments) an almost completely new musical shape, that is the one that can be achieved through the tone peculiarities and the technical potentialities of modern instruments according to the criteria of the philological performance.
"Canti di Corte", the first CD of an ensemble consisting of very young instrumentalists, carried out in very sort times and with an extremely low quantity of cuts, is addressed to a potentially wide audience in which we hope to renew the interest in ancient music, most notably the "Musica Antica di Area Mantovana" (ancient music of the area surrounding Mantua), whose acronym M.A.d.A.M. we want to remember as good omen for the adventure we embarked on. (Davide Guarneri)