Walther Scherzi da Violino Solo: Album booklet by Delphian Records

Johann Jakob Walther (1650–1717) BOJAN CD1

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[Adagio I] Presto Lento Allegro I

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[Adagio II] [Adagio II] Adagio III Allegro III

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III. Sonata in D major * 13 14

Allegro & forte Adagio – Presto – Adagio

Recorded on 26-30 July 2021 in St Martin’s Church, East Woodhay, Hampshire Producer/Engineer: Paul Baxter 24-bit digital editing: Jack Davis 24-bit digital mastering: Paul Baxter Design: Drew Padrutt Booklet editor: Henry Howard

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IV. Sonata in G major 22 [Adagio – Allegro] 23 [Allegro I] 24 [Adagio I] 25 [Allegro II] 26 [Adagio II] 27 [Allegro III]

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V. Aria in E minor 28 Aria: Malincon[ico] 29 Presto – Tremolo 30 [Allegro I] 31 Adagio 32 [Allegro II]

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VI. Sonata in B flat major 33 Adagio 34 Presto 35 [Andante – Staccato] 36 [Allegro] 37 Aria

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II. Sonata in C major

Adagio I [Allegro II] [Adagio II] Largo [Adagio III]

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I. Suite in A major * 1 Allemanda 2 Corrente 3 Sarabanda 4 Giga

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Scherzi da violino solo con il basso continuo per l’organo ò cimbalo, accompagnabile anche con una viola ò leuto

Lento [Allegro I]

C THE ILLYRIA CONSORT

Cover image: Johan Jakob Walther (c.1604–c.1677), A Male Teal, watercolour and gouache heightened with gum arabic. Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 2006 Session photography: foxbrushfilms.com Delphian Records Ltd – Edinburgh – UK www.delphianrecords.co.uk

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Total playing time (CD1) * premiere recordings

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X. Imitatione del cuccu

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VII. Sonata in A major 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

[Adagio] – Allegro Adagio – Cuccu 21 Adagio – Presto 22 [Andante] – Cuccu 23 Cuccu 24 Adagio I 25 Largo – Cuccu 26 Adagio II 19

[Grave – Presto] Adagio I [Andante I] [Andante II]

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Adagio & Presto Lento Adagio II

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VIII. Sonata in C major 8 [Introduzione] 9 Adagio & Presto

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XI. Sonata in B flat major * [1:26] [2:18]

[Allegro I] Ondeggiando 12 Arpeggiando con arcate sciolte 13 Allegro II 14 Adagio – Prestissimo

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IX. Sonata in D major 15 [Adagio] 16 [Andante] 17 [Adagio – Allegro – Adagio] 18 Allegro

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Bojan Čičić and the Illyria Consort gratefully acknowledge the generous support of Continuo Foundation and of John Osborn, without which this recording would not have been possible.

[Andante] [Adagio – Presto] 29 Staccato [Allegro] 30 Lento 31 Largo 32 Adagissimo 33 [Finale] 27

XII. Aria in E minor * 34 Aria: Adagio Presto 36 Allegro I 37 Adagio 38 A gusto 39 Allegro II 40 Arp[eggiata]: legato 41 Affetuoso 42 Allegro III 35

Total playing time (CD2) * premiere recordings

[1:35] [1:47] [0:48] [0:58] [1:39] [0:40] [0:57] [0:58] [1:00] [1:01] [0:52] [0:50] [0:31] [0:43] [0:39] [0:57] [49:48]

Notes on the music The virtuoso violinist has long been a celebrated centrepiece of Western concert culture. In the public consciousness the earliest and arguably most iconic representative of the high art of superhuman dexterity is the Italian Nicolò Paganini. And so it has been since the early 1860s, when the French composer and music lexicographer Joseph-François Fétis described Johann Jakob Walther as ‘le Paganini de son siècle’. The Frenchman was judging Walther on the basis of the printed music that had survived: the Scherzi da violino solo con il basso continuo per l’organo ò cembalo, accompagnabile anche con una viola ò leuto were published in Dresden in 1676. A second collection of instrumental music, Hortulus chelicus uni violino duabus, tribus et quatuor subinde chordis simul sonantibus harmonice modulanti, followed in 1688. Yet the historical and geographical distance between the two violinists was, in fact, bridged by an unbroken tradition of virtuosity as a violinistic practice, kept alive by cultural migration between Italy and the German-speaking lands. Paganini’s famous caprices had a direct precedent in musical practices captured in earlier publications such as Locatelli’s L’arte del violino of 1733. A more expressive, melodious and tonally nuanced virtuosity, that did not rely purely on fireworks, had been the staple of Corelli’s and Tartini’s music, both of whom made exceptional use of the sonata as

a genre in which to display both the serious nature of solo violin music and its potential for performative depth. Their music, disseminated across Europe in fine publications, straddled the line between heroicising the violinist and celebrating the composer’s virtue as an artist. Virtuosity, in the early eighteenth and, crucially, the seventeenth century, was a matter of personal refinement and of the theoretical knowledge that would inform music making at every turn, and only in the third instance was it a matter of practical facility. Corelli, Geminiani and Tartini’s predecessors Marco Uccellini, Biagio Marini, Carlo Farina and their contemporaries occupied high positions as court musicians in the North Italian cities of Venice, Mantua, Modena, Parma and Milan, where music was promoted to display cultural supremacy as much as it was to entertain. From here, cultural exchange with the German-speaking lands was wellestablished. Giovanni Battista Buonamente was musicista da camera to the emperor in Vienna, and Farina entered into employment at the Saxon court of the Elector Johann Georg I in Dresden; Marini served as Kapellmeister at the Wittelsbach court in Neuburg, while Johann Jakob Walther of Witterda near Erfurt travelled south to spend three years as a violinist in Florence. It was certainly his credentials as a violinist with Italian taste and training that recommended his employment in the service of the elector of Saxony between

1673 and 1680 as primo violinista da camera. Indeed, the second edition of his Scherzi da violino solo printed in Mainz in 1687 is prefaced by a florid dedication to Cosimo III, grand duke of Tuscany, a presentation designed to leave no one in doubt of Walther’s Italian connections.

The instruments of the violin family had rapidly become central to this development. While the instruments of the viol family were traditionally considered the tools for musical refinement and, as such, were played by noblemen, the violin family had previously been associated with the lower-class fiddler and the hand-to-mouth professional musician. Indeed, the Italian influence was significant Through its expansive use in the new genre in more ways than one. Farina, somewhat of music drama of the early seventeenth of a celebrity in the 1620s at the court of century – Monteverdi’s Orfeo and his dramatic Johann Georg I in Dresden, where his five madrigal Il combattimento di Tancredi e collections of instrumental music were Clorinda deserve particular mention here – the published, ushered in a new interest in instrument rapidly accrued a special status. instrumental music. His rhythmic and melodic The exploration and celebration of its particular language betrays his roots in the vocal style sound properties and versatility allowed the of early Italian opera, with its declamatory violin to emerge as a new symbol of musical recitatives as well as its relationship with refinement. Indeed, in Monteverdi’s Orfeo the instrumental diminution practices. His use of mythological hero is musically represented by rapidly repeating notes and broken chords, the violin instead of one of the plucked string the exploitation of the upper register of the instruments; the lyre is abandoned in favour violin and an exploration of the timbres of of violins that conjure a more profoundly the different strings set a new bar in violin emotional world around the hero, ultimately playing. The use of expressive idiomatic allowing for an identification of the virtuoso techniques – pizzicato, tremolo, col legno musician with the instrument. and glissando – was influenced by the use of instruments for theatrical expression Marini had learned his particular violinistic as much as by the desire to develop an skills while serving directly under Monteverdi affective musical language beyond music’s in Venice, while Farina worked with the role in bringing words to life. It signalled a composer’s legacy in Mantua before bringing new conceptualisation of music that used the new styles and ideas to Dresden. Their sound painting as a means to stir emotions imaginative development of a highly idiomatic and stimulate the imagination rather than musical language went hand in hand with conjuring cosmic harmonies. the changing status of the instrument as it

Notes on the music became the quintessential tool for the musical virtuoso, taking its place alongside organs and other keyboard instruments. New ways of performing on the violin were captured in a wave of new publications. The latter remained costly endeavours and their increasing frequency and ornate presentation says as much about the violin’s status as it does about the nascent printing and publishing industry.

violin itself, as a highly affective tool through the strategic use of idiomatic techniques and sound effects and through experiments with the violin body’s sonorities when played in different scordatura tunings.

Walther’s collection is an almost encyclopaedic endeavour in showcasing both the potential of the violin to stir the ‘passions and affections’ and his own versatility and imagination as The German-speaking lands bred their own a violinist. He prefaces his catalogue of crop of violin virtuosi: the Habsburg court techniques and colours across these twelve musician (later vice- and finally Kapellmeister) multi-movement sonatas with a set composed Johann Heinrich Schmelzer produced in 1664 as a Suite in A major. Its opening Allemanda the earliest publication of a set of sonatas foreshadows what is to come: following a in a German-speaking country that was sectional style, it presents a monumentally devoted purely to the solo violin with continuo grand opening movement in which Walther accompaniment. It appeared at a time when plays with melodic and rhythmic figurations the sonata as a genre was emerging as the that immediately demand the performer harbinger of a new celebration of purely – then as now – to enter into a dialogue instrumental music that was to take hold of with him by responding with appropriate music aesthetics over the course of the next ornamentation. Here, Walther’s virtuosity hundred years: a genre that was un-texted, (in the seventeenth-century sense of the independent of strict theatrical or liturgical word) is on display, just as knowledge of function and therefore free to assume a musical language and the intricacies of the variety of meanings. As such, it would become art of ornamentation is demanded of the the play-space both of compositional ingenuity virtuoso performer today. In addition, Walther and of performative virtuosity; a virtuosity that takes us through the gamut of the violin’s lay in the ability to manipulate the passions idiomatic capabilities from bowing techniques, and stun through physical dexterity. Heinrich carefully notated under the slurs, to rapid von Biber, active in Salzburg, adopted Italian note repetitions that already demand the onomatopoeic effects into his sonatas; but arcate sciolte – the loose bow – to which his real achievement, of course, lay in his he devotes an entire movement in No. VIII, imaginative expansion of the instrument, the Sonata in C major. Sonorous double stops

alternate with passages that are polyphonically conceived in a quasi-dialogue style; arpeggios with passages that explore particular string sonorities. The richness set up here permeates the entire collection of sonatas, each in a different number of movements or sections determined by the particular fun he seems to have had as a player. No. II, Sonata in C major is in many ways the most academic: it follows a movement pattern that mimics the genre’s development elsewhere with its strict alternation of tempi and affects. Here Walther shows off his skill in the variation style. The latter comes to the fore particularly in the sonata X, Imitatione del cuccu, written in the new fashion for mimicry of natural sounds in music that Farina had displayed prominently in his Cappricio stravagante of 1627. Walther’s take on this is arguably more sophisticated, since he doesn’t so much use the violin’s expressive techniques to imitate sounds as allow the ‘cuccu’ motif to take the listener into realms of the affective imagination as it is transformed and suffuses the music in new guises, giving it depth instead of drawing attention to its surface. That such attention to music’s emotional impact is indeed intentional is illustrated not least in his nod to human temperaments when he opens the sonata V, Aria in E minor with an ‘aria malinconico.’ Walther’s virtuosity, then, is characterised by his deep knowledge of compositional and aesthetic techniques. But what is presented

on the page and left for us to see speaks of a deeply physical approach to playing the violin. The arcate sciolte is but one example of haptic composition: Walther clearly adored the feeling of the bow rapidly moving across the strings, allowing the right elbow to draw undulating shapes – a mandala drawn with the body and equally mesmerising both for the executor and the spectator. Here, as in the particular lefthand patterns, in the bowed confluences and the tirades, Walther combines his exploitation of the organological intricacies of the violin and bow with his own physical knowledge and experience as a player. Sown on the fertile ground of Italian–German musical exchange that gave rise to the new violin virtuosity, Walther’s music is surely also indebted to the particularly art-nurturing circumstances of the court in Dresden in the 1670s. Johann Georg II was far more interested in building a cultural than a political empire. So as to turn the city into a musical capital, he welcomed foreign musicians and was particularly intent on enriching his 53-strong Kapelle with Italian instrumentalists. He indulged in lavish musical festivals, including elaborate ceremonial processions and multiple theatrical entertainments that involved dance and ballet alongside acting and singing. The elector commissioned a vast opera house to be built on the side of the palace, which opened in January 1667. It was designed to host visually and aurally

Notes on the music

The Illyria Consort

spectacular performances for an audience of 2,000. The musical lavishness desired at court rubbed off on Walther and is manifest in a collection unusually extensive in scale and depth. His sonatas, in their variety and tactility, mimic the operatic stage within the universe of the solo violin, channelling drama, emotion and a desire for fireworks and spectacle through the arms and fingers of the performer.

Bojan Čičić violin

Susanne Heinrich bass viol David Miller archlute, theorbo Steven Devine harpsichord, organ Violin by G. Tononi, 1701 Bologna 6-string bass viol by LuMi, 2013 Archlute by Martin Haycock, 1987 after Tieffenbrucker Theorbo by Martin Haycock after Italian models Single-manual harpsichord by Colin Booth, 2013 after Christian Vater (Hanover, 1738) 4-stop chamber organ by Robin Jennings, 2019

Biographies Croatian-born violinist Bojan Čičić specialises in repertoire ranging from the late sixteenth century to the Romantic violin concertos of Mendelssohn and Beethoven. He is the leader of the Academy of Ancient Music and the ensemble Florilegium and is frequently invited to lead orchestras such as the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, Concerto Copenhagen and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. His recording of J.S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins with Rachel Podger was named the best available recording of the work by BBC Radio 3’s ‘Building a Library’ in February 2022. As well as founding and directing The Illyria Consort, Bojan has been invited to perform as a music director and a soloist with the Academy of Ancient Music, Slovenian Philharmonic Orchestra, Washington Bach Consort and Phion Orchestra in the Netherlands. 2023 will see the release on Delphian of his recording of J.S. Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin (DCD34300). In 2016 Bojan was appointed Professor of Baroque Violin at the Royal College of Music. He is passionate about training the next generation of instrumentalists in historically informed playing styles.

Bojan Čičić originally founded The Illyria Consort to explore rare repertoire of the seventeenth and eigheenth centuries from the Venetian Republic and the Habsburg Empire. The group was invited to perform at early music festivals in Europe such as the Korkyra Baroque Festival in Croatia, Laus Polyphoniae Festival in Belgium, Festival de Sablé in France, Utrecht Early Music Festival in the Netherlands and the York Early Music Christmas Festival in the UK. Its recordings have received great critical acclaim. The debut recording, on Delphian, of Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli’s Sonate da camera Nos. 1–6 (DCD34194) was chosen as one of Presto Classical’s Recordings of the Year for 2017. 2019 saw the release of two projects, the second volume of Carbonelli Sonatas (Delphian DCD34214) and a world première recording of Giovanni Giornovich’s London Concertos (DCD34219). 2021 brought two further releases: Pyrotechnia (DCD34249) showcasing virtuosic violin concertos by Vivaldi, Tartini and Locatelli, and a collaboration with The Marian Consort in Adriatic Voyage (DCD34260), presenting music by composers born on the Croatian coast in the 16th century. Adriatic Voyage won a Presto Recordings of the Year Award in 2021. An album of instrumental Christmas music (DCD34278) is to be released in 2022.

Pelham Humfrey: Sacred Choral Music The Choir of Her Majesty’s Chapel Royal, St James’s Palace / Joseph McHardy; Alexander Chance, Nicholas Mulroy, Nick Pritchard, Ashley Riches soloists

Giovanni Giornovich: ‘London’ Concertos Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort DCD34219

PRESTO Editor’s Choice

DCD34237

Giovanni Giornovich was one of the most colourful and popular violin virtuosos of his day. Apparently of Croatian descent, he was seemingly known by a different name in every country he toured (Ivan Jarnović and Giovanni Giornovichi, among some thirty variants), deliberately making the most of his mysterious origins. More mysterious still is why these concertos – full of wit, charm and character, and redolent of the international musical life of Haydn’s London in the 1790s – should have waited so long to be recorded. Modern-day virtuoso Bojan Čičić and his Illyria Consort, fresh from their triumphant revival of the sonatas of Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli on Delphian, are ideal champions to bring this delightful music back to life.

A protégé of Henry Cooke, first director of the choir of the Chapel Royal after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, Pelham Humfrey was part of a generation of musicians who enriched the musical life of their native England with influences drawn from continental Europe – from France, where Humfrey had studied between 1664 and 1667, and from the Italian musicians at work in the London to which he returned, succeeding Cooke in 1672. Today the same choir sings at St James’s Palace, where, joined by a small instrumental ensemble led by Delphian regular Bojan Čičić and with an antiphonal layout inspired by records of the former chapel at Whitehall, this group of ten boy choristers and six adult singers revives the musical and devotional world of its former director.

‘a glimpse of a lost performing world and its forgotten music … Čičić is a clean and assured soloist’ — Gramophone, May 2019

Recordings of the Year 2017 – Winner

‘A terrific new disc which … under McHardy’s fine direction, brings a new sense of style to the music of this period’ — Planet Hugill, January 2021, FIVE STARS

Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli (1694–1773): Sonate da Camera Nos 1–6 Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli: Sonate da Camera Nos 7–12 Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

DCD34194

DCD34214

In certain respects, Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli does not fit the eighteenthcentury mould. For a neo-Corellian, he is unusually fond of complexity, both technical and compositional, and also unusually open to other contemporary influences, such as those of Handel and Vivaldi. But the quality of his music speaks for itself – virtuosic and joyously melodic, these six ‘chamber sonatas’ had a huge impact on release. Carbonelli’s difficulty has ensured that his work is seldom played, but early-music rising star Bojan Čičić makes sure we have no sense of that as he and his Illyria Consort colleagues champion these groundbreaking compositions with exuberant confidence.

With their debut recording on Delphian, Bojan Čičić and his Illyria Consort propelled the name of Carbonelli from obscurity into the classical charts, recapturing the excitement which the violinist-composer stirred up in eighteenth-century London. Now they bring to Carbonelli’s other six surviving sonatas the same intelligence, sensitivity and sheer, exhilarating virtuosic brilliance with which they proved him to be so much more than just a ‘follower of Corelli’ or ‘contemporary of Vivaldi’. For good measure they add in a fine concerto by the latter that bears Carbonelli’s name, demonstrating the respect in which he was held in his native Italy before setting off to find his fame and fortune in England.

‘superb and passionate … Čičić’s sound – sweet, slightly dry and exquisitely centred – is ideal for the taut beauty of Carbonelli’s solo lines’ — BBC Music Magazine, September 2017, CHAMBER CHOICE

PRESTO Editor’s Choice

‘crisp and buoyant, with the engineering giving a bright, ear-grabbing immediacy to the sound … Čičić is as much a joy as last time for his superlative virtuoso technique and energetic poetry’ — Gramophone, September 2019

The Taste of this Nation: Pepusch – Corbett – Shuttleworth Ciara Hendrick mezzo-soprano, Spiritato / Kinga Ujszászi

Handel: The Triumph of Time and Truth Sophie Bevan, Mary Bevan, Tim Mead, Ed Lyon, William Berger soloists, Ludus Baroque / Richard Neville-Towle

DCD34236

DCD34135 (2 discs)

This portrait of the rapid arrival and astonishing success of Italian styles and genres in pre-Handelian London is centred, perhaps surprisingly, on an immigrant from Prussia – Johann Christoph Pepusch, who composed for the Italian soprano Margarita de L’Epine (also based in London) what can be regarded as the first English cantatas in the Italian style; mezzo-soprano Ciara Hendrick is on dazzling vocal form in four of them here. Obadiah Shuttleworth’s concerti grossi, meanwhile, are inventive reimaginings of violin sonatas by Corelli, and William Corbett’s infectious Bizarrie Universali show how a composer who had spent extensive time on the Continent could trade on his Italian connections to win favour with audiences in his native land.

PRESTO Recordings of the Year 2014 – Finalist

‘finely shaped, unflamboyant conducting, gracious playing … Sophie Bevan plays Beauty in what is arguably her finest recording to date; the final aria is breathtaking’ — The Guardian, June 2014

‘a release lovers of Baroque byways will surely find rewarding’ — Gramophone, April 2021 Adriatic Voyage: Seventeenth-century music from Venice to Dalmatia The Marian Consort / Rory McCleery; The Illyria Consort / Bojan Čičić

PRESTO Recordings of the Year 2021 – Winner

Ludus Baroque and five stellar soloists bring to life Handel’s rarely heard final oratorio, a remarkable Protestant re-casting of a work written fifty years earlier to a text by the young composer’s Roman patron Cardinal Pamphilj. Compelled by Time and Truth to accept the divine order of change and decay, Beauty ultimately gives way to an assertion of redemption by good works, reflected in the incorporation of choruses Handel had written for the Foundling Hospital. The resulting work, neglected by centuries of scholarship on account of its hybrid origins, here proves an extraordinary feast of riches.

Pyrotechnia: Fire & Fury from 18th-Century Italy Bojan Čičić violin, The Illyria Consort

DCD34260

DCD34249

Two of Delphian’s most admired ensembles join forces for this imaginative programme of sacred and secular music by composers working along the Dalmatian Coast – now largely in Croatia, then mostly the territory of Venice – in the decades around 1600. It was a time in which constant movement of people and trade of goods created linguistic and cultural cross-currents, in contrast to the sharp distinctions encouraged in later centuries by the emergence of modern nation states. Much of this music would have been regarded as Venetian, but the journey points up intriguing differences between the composers and pieces presented, many of them in premiere recordings, while violinist and director Bojan Čičić’s interactions with cornettist Gawain Glenton – and the rich ornamentation contributed by all the musicians here – bring the period back to vivid, unforgettable life.

Contemporary accounts of the violin playing of Antonio Vivaldi, the ‘Red Priest’, show the extent to which he raised the instrument to hitherto unknown extremes of soloistic virtuosity – able, in its spontaneity and sonorous brilliance, to hold its own against an orchestra in fiery and unforgettably dramatic confrontations.

‘A cornucopia of sacred and secular instrumental and vocal music, performed with arresting, period-evocative beauty’ — Gramophone, January 2022

PRESTO Editor’s Choice

Thanks to Vivaldi’s pupils, eager to imitate the master’s wilder imaginings, several of his improvised cadenzas have been preserved. Here, they inspire typically white-hot performances from Bojan Čičić and The Illyria Consort of four violin concertos by Vivaldi, Tartini and Locatelli which all have movements ending in a ‘capriccio’ – a sequence designed to show that the idea of a virtuosic display cadenza, usually associated with the classical concerto of a later period, had already developed during the first half of the eighteenth century. ‘Čičić’s approach – sensitive and fluid, while never less than technically immaculate – shows these unashamedly swaggering pieces in all their ostentatious magnificence’ — Presto Music, October 2021

DCD34294