Category: Sheet music

Nine German Arias for Soprano, Solo Instrument and Basso continuo…
Edited by Ullrich Scheideler
G. Henle Verlag (968).
ix +42pp +parts for solo instrument, basso and continuo €16.00.

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he ‘German Arias’ were intended to be published in vol. 49 of Chrysander’s complete edition in the 1890s. Henle has now produced a cheap but thoroughly edited version. Normally Handel wrote quickly then got his amanuensis to make a clear version, which was then reproduced several times and sometimes he had it printed. In this case, it seems that Handel sent his only copy to Germany.

The Henle edition certainly looks better than the ones I have (or rather, used to have). It consists of a score and separate booklets for the solo instrument (not specified, though ad lib for violin, recorder or oboe) with smaller-stave for voice, basso (single stave), and continuo with the upper two staves in smaller print and sometimes pages spread out in three. The score has a realisation. The nine arias can be sung in sequence, though I’d favour more variety – alternative pieces could also be interspersed.

This is an excellent edition, and good value.

Clifford Bartlett

Critical Edition by Daniela Calcamo, Daniele Cannavò, Maria Rosa De Luca. Introduction by Maria Rosa De Luca
Musiche Rinascimentali siciliane, vol. 26
Leo S. Olschki: 2015 xxxiv + 88 pp. €44.00
ISBN 978 88 222 6420 6

[dropcap]D[/dropcap]omenico Campisi, a long forgotten early 17th-century Sicilian composer and a Dominican monk of Palermo, was rediscovered in the 19th century thanks to abbott Fortunato Santini, who found and copied parts of the 1627 Roman print (Masotti) of his fifth book of motets, Lilia Campi. Complete prints are found in separate part-books in the Santini-Bibliothek in Munich and in the Civico Museo Bibliografico in Bologna. The title plays on the composer’s surname. We do not know for certain who he was: he may have been a Giuseppe Campisi, baptized in Regalbuto in 1588. Of his other collections of sacred motets (1615, 1618, 1622 and 1623), three of which were published in Palermo, only one, a Roman print (Robletti) of 1622, has come to light. Dominican documents show that he already had his bachelor’s degree in theology by 1622, and his promotion to a master’s degree was approved in 1629 in recognition of his musical accomplishments. He is listed, with others of the Barberini circle, in the bibliographical catalogue Apes Urbanae  (in honour of Pope Urban VIII) of 1632 by Leone Allacci, which may suggest that he was also active in Rome.

The introduction and critical apparatus are in Italian only, and while the first is valuable reading for the musical, historical and geographical context, it is not particularly relevant to the composer or this work, nor is there specific information about influences on Campisi. So the English reader is really not losing essential information, as the music speaks for itself.
The 22 motets are short (25 to 50 bars of breves), easy, verging on homophonic, and with a figured continuo. They can be performed by single voices or small choirs. Those with more voices present more contrapuntal play between voices that enter and those that accompany. Five are for two voices, seven for three, five a4, four a5  and one a6. Correct modern spelling and punctuation of the Latin texts precede the musical annotations. Their sources are given (the 1592 Vulgate, the Dominican 1603 Breviarum…, and the 1604 Missale), but no translations.

Three musicologists shared the editing, doing seven or eight motets each, as well as working together. As far as I can tell without seeing more than the one page provided in facsimile of the Canto part of the first motet, they are fairly faithful transcriptions, but not sufficiently well-edited. Caveat emptor/musicus!  Original errors in the print have escaped attention; most of the editorial accidentals are convincing though a few are surely incorrect, and the need for others (for consistency or to weigh in on ambiguities) was not appreciated; some accidentals “preserved” in this, the first ever modern edition, appeared originally, as often happens in prints, in front of notes they weren’t intended for (e.g. bar 20 of the Canto 1° of Beati qui habitant  in the facsimile, the sharp on the f’ was probably meant for the e’ two notes later, confirming that it is no longer lowered); the original continuo figures from the organ part are supplemented in brackets, but are not always corrected, realigned, or noted where wrong, which may be misleading. It is hard to fathom why the occasional wrong notes or figures in the original did not trigger more editorial intervention, because users of a modern edition expect such a beautifully printed score to be thoroughly proofread!

I have a question for the editors. Did Masotti not use demisemiquaver (32nd note) figures? From the facsimile page one can see that his movable characters include two styles sometimes used indiscriminately for semiquavers (16th notes): the little open 2 or the tiny closed 3 hugging the note-stem, the latter of which was, in fact, a 32nd. The mixture is just curious enough to make me wonder if the dot you removed from a quaver in bar 24 of Beati  served to make the following pair of quick notes into demisemiquavers, and if pairs of ‘semiquavers’ where the two note forms happen to alternate were perhaps meant to be sung unequally?

I take this occasion to encourage Olschki and other music publishers to print more music per page, with narrower bars and staves. We do not need an inch between minims where these are syllables of a word, and it is actually harder to read the words and phrase the music if we can only see two bars of the score per line… sometimes only one! I read somewhere that the human eye can only focus in the center of the retina, and therefore we spend most of the time reading music looking up and down, right and left, in order to gather and consign to short-term memory what we have to look around to see. Of course, there’s the sorry option of photocopying to reduce the size to a format more practical to perform from. At least the present edition is not too heavy for a music stand, and in Ego flos campi  (another reference to the composer?) Olschki easily got three systems (21 staves) per page. That print size would have been better from page one.

Barbara Sachs

Edited by Enrico Gatti, Introduction by Guido Olivieri.
Facsimile with editorial notes in English and Italian, plus a modern edition in a separate volume.
LIM, 2015. 105pp. €35
ISBN 9788870968323

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]hese 12 suites, Sonate da camera à violino e violoncello in the manuscript source, are edited by Enrico Gatti, who has recorded them for Glossa (GCD 921209). Guido Olivieri describes the source, the hand, and the date, after having written more exhaustively about their attribution to Corelli in Arcomelo 2013  (See the acts of this convention in the review of Arcomelo 2013 above). Violinists and cellists will be curious to see these ‘new’, presumably early, compositions by Corelli. So I’ll try to say what they are and aren’t.

The format of the volumes, dictated by the Facsimile, is horizontal. The modern transcription of each sonata occupies a single two-page opening. Some of the sonatas slightly exceed two pages in the manuscript, requiring page turns. Each begins with a Preludio  of from five to 13 bars in duple or triple time, with and without double stops. The second movements are Alemande  [sic] or Balletti, the third are Correnti, Gighe, or Gavotte.

Sonata 12 is a special case, with double-stops throughout, as well as chords on three or four strings. Instead of ‘Balletto’ the manuscript clearly appears to say ‘Bassetto’, which is rather peculiar, and ignored by Gatti. But I might surmise why. This sonata is inverted: the bass-line in the Preludio  is in quavers, under the violin’s almost static, harmonic crotchet double-stops; in the ‘Bassetto’(?) it is the driving melody, over which the violin plays rhythmic and melodic imitations and complete chords of three notes. In the Corrente  bass and violin are rhythmically complementary, the violin, again, playing complete chords throughout. In fact, the ‘melody’ line of the violin in the first eight bars of the Corrente  is eee|e–|e–|e– |eee|e–|(rest)|e, all on the open e” string, under which the lower voices have some limited stepwise movement. Not much of a solo. Since the violin in effect plays a chordal realization of the melodic bass-line throughout all three movements, not only could this be considered a Cello sonata, rather than a Violin sonata, but it is also a contemporary example, attributed to Corelli, of a continuo realization.

This is not the only movement in the set where the cello is accompanied by the violin, and another reason to credit Galli, a cellist, as the scribe (1748). Furthermore, the Lemmario del Lessico della Letteratura Musicale Italiana (1490-1950)  gives only two examples of the expressions fare il bassetto  and suonare il bassetto, in both cases referring to the violin not being the soprano voice, but playing an octave higher than a would-be bass.

The editors believe Corelli could have written this set in the early 1670s as an exercise or test of qualification. Its structural traits are typical of composers of French-inspired suites for guitar active in Bologna at that time.

The facsimile volume is prefaced by Gatti’s observations and critical notes (not only in two languages, but under two separate headings, unfortunately, with enough redundancy to be a bit confusing). These must be read in order to appreciate and be respectfully wary of his revisions. I’ll only mention some cases in which there may be more sophisticated solutions in readings he rejected, and even more reasons for the attribution to Corelli.

In the Preludio  of Sonata II Gatti omits ‘an incongruous 6’ taking the continuo ♭ figure to refer to the 3rd. It is common to find continuo figures written horizontally, and 4 ♭ 6 3 certainly means 4/♮ 6 followed by 3/[5]. There was no need to specify that the 3rd is minor, whereas the lowered ♮6 is cautionary since the next bass note is a g♯. The resulting minor six-four chord is beautiful.

In the Preludio  of Sonata III Gatti reproduces the small quaver b” hovering a 7th above the violin’s c”♯, with the necessary editorial flat. There should be an editorial slur linking them, because this is a vocal-style appoggiatura, falling by a wide diminished-7th leap, exactly like the written-out one in the 5th bar of Sonata X, e”♭ quaver followed by f’♯. In the Balletto  Gatti unfortunately inserted an editorial flat in bar 15 not demanded by the sequence. On the contrary, the three ascending semiquavers start with a semitone three times: e f g|a in the continuo, and in both continuo and violin b’ c” d”|e”. If the violin flattens the first note, it produces an ugly false relation (a tetrachord spanning an augmented 4th).

There are numerous moot points reported in the Critical Notes for Sonata XII. I mention a few of them because the attribution to Corelli and the reliability of the copyist are still open questions, and these are all matters of composition that bear on the quality of the writing, and which I think Gatti may have underestimated:

The Balletto  has many suspensions in double-stops for the violin, which the copyist sometimes miswrote. In bar 15, however, his mistake was not in the notes (which Gatti changed, giving a g” instead of the prepared d”♯) but in reversing their order to make the 3rds descend: upward resolving 3rds are fine in an ‘accompaniment’, the figures 9–8 are still appropriate despite the movement of the bass, they fit the top line in 3rds beautifully, especially as the prepared 9/♯7 has already resolved upward in the previous bar.

In bars 17 and 19 an error by the scribe was not corrected by Gatti, and my guess is that Galli (?) copied the bass-line correctly but resolved the 4th incorrectly, too soon with respect to the bass. It sounds wrong, and the violin resolves anyway on the second beat, where the figure is 3. In 22 both Galli (?) and Gatti forgot to indicate e”♮.

Two things to Corelli’s credit are edited out in the Corrente, because proceeding by analogy is sometimes a trap. 1) Bars 39 and 43 are presumably meant to be identical, but which of the two readings is right? I would rather have a ♯4/2 chord over an a than a 5/♯ chord over a b which is coming anyway in the next bar for the cadence; and how can the cello note between two g#s be other than the a found in bar 43? 2) All of the cadences are echoed, and Gatti makes the echo to the first part in bar 44 conform to bar 40. Here, too (and not in the second part of the dance, where the final bar is a triple stop), the manuscript may be right the second time, or perhaps they are meant to be different. Either way, bar 44 has what in English we call a “Corelli clash”. Italian has no similarly endearing term, but the resolution of 4 to ♯3 under the anticipation of the tonic (here to be played as a d♯”, e” double stop) has quite a long tradition, and in many other cadences in this set the tonic is indeed anticipated. If Corelli adopted rising suspensions from Frescobaldi and the leading-note/ tonic clash from the likes of Luigi Rossi and others, then finding a couple of such experiments in his early work just might be important to notice.

Luckily in this welcome edition we have the Facsimile, which one player can play from, and Gatti’s transcription separately for the other player, not to mention his observations in Italian and English which list almost all of the questionable details to think about critically.

Barbara Sachs