Secret Pages
Stefano Maiorana (theorbo)
Andrea Dandolo (producer, sound engineer, editor)
rec. 2021, Teatrino Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy
Arcana A541 [59]

This imaginative, well-produced and stimulating CD contains music by the seventeenth-century composer Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, and by Claudio Ambrosini, who was born in 1948 in Venice. Stefano Maiorana plays the theorbo on ten tracks of each composer’s music.  Even if Secret Pages did not contain six world premiere recordings, it would be well worth a close look.

The two composers’ music is judiciously interspersed with half a dozen very brief sound pictures of Venice in its lagoon by producer and sound engineer, Andrea Dandolo. These ‘intervals’ do just what they are intended to do. Each lasts barely 30 seconds and unobtrusively evokes the essence of Venice, with which Ambrosini’s music is saturated – and to which it pays respectful and mature homage.

The intention of this somewhat unusual collection (not a ‘concept’ release, note) is really only secondarily to bring Venice to mind… even though both Kapsberger and Ambrosini are closely associated with the city. The main purposes of Secret Pages (Maiorana’s second recording with Arcana) are surely two: to celebrate the innovative creativity of Kapsberger – particularly when set in the context of Venetian life at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Then to offer comparisons between Kapsberger and the highly determined experimenter, Claudio Ambrosini, who is at as much home with Baroque sounds as with electronic ones. It’s almost as if Ambrosini picks up on Secret Pages where Kapsberger leaves off. Both display the same intensity – aggression almost – and love of sound. To these Maiorana does great service thanks to his superb technique and ability to convey the expressivity of each composer’s contours, phrasing and melodic surprises.

Indeed, the gentility, the understated nature and the lapping soundscapes of Venice (without the tourists) are very well conjured up over the hour of music and aural treats on this CD. Yet it’s the interleaving of Baroque with contemporary music and audio that strikes you the most. Perhaps this is because most of the pieces are relatively slow in tempo – and so invite reflection.

We are drawn to the expressivity of Maiorana’s expert playing from the first moment to the last. There is little sense of impression. More of varied but direct and focused musicality. How can two composers both be so struck by the particular nature of Venice four hundred years apart – yet have such enticing things to say about it directly through their music? Well, Maiorana bridges the gap by the intensity and focus of his playing.

Maiorana also draws our attention to the similarities between Kapsberger and Ambrosini.

The latter’s Aria [tr.10], for instance, has the ruminative and tentative qualities of the former’s reticent melodies. Though each composer is also very much their own person. Kapsberger ploughed his own furrow throughout his life. His music doesn’t shy away from change, contrast and innovation. The Richercata [tr.14] is exemplifies this well… we are held in happy suspense wondering where the tonalities (and phrasing, rhythms) will take us next. Given the relationship between accepted late Renaissance conventions and exploration – of counterpoint, for instance – the sense of curiosity in Kapsberger’s music perhaps emerges best in its spontaneity. Ambrosini, too, embraces the unexpected – by turning the soft and limpid into the angular and stark – as in his Canzone [tr.13], for example. It is both redolent of Early Modern cadences, and insistent in a way that  – like Venice itself – demands respectful attention to twenty-first century anxieties.

Indeed, Venice – unlike Naples, the other city in Italy that will define you as either an italophile or a one-time visitor – never bids you make a fuss of reacting. Look but don’t feel that you must touch. The self-confidence of its inhabitants, the extraordinary ‘geology’ and architecture, and – above all, perhaps – the famous Sposalizio del Mare (marriage to the sea) symbolising the happy co-existence of the elements like nowhere else on earth are all alluded to in ‘Kapsberger, Secret Pages’.

Similarly, Ambrosini’s Canzone in eco [tr.15] makes a brief, challenging, statement which is itself the essence of the unexpected. Perhaps the fact that the very next track is one of Dandolo’s references – here to (moored) cruise ships – repeats the point that such crass abuse of nature as sailing massive ships around the delicate tracery of Venice – many of which weigh tens of thousands of tons – is unforgivable.

We know a lot less about Kapsberger (whose family was Austrian, although he may well have been born in Venice) than we do about Ambrosini. After completing a Masters degree in languages and literature at Milan, he studied both early and contemporary music at Venice, being influenced by working with Maderna and Nono. Ambrosini was the first Italian composer to win the Prix de Rome (in 1985); and subsequently received commissions from – among many others – the Italian state broadcasting service, RAI, the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), the French government, Teatro La Fenice and Accademia Filarmonica Romana. In 1983, Ambrosini  founded the Centro Internazionale per la Ricerca Strumentale, which he still directs.

The success of Maiorana, who is equally accomplished, is to point up the gift which both composers have for unpretentious, even modest, virtuosity. And yet to do so without the hint of spurious show in his playing. This he achieves by close attention to detail and to the beautiful and rich sound of the theorbo, which differs from the lute in that its neck is much longer and can accommodate a second pegbox allowing a wider range of pitches.

The acoustic in which the 20 theorbo tracks were recorded is that of the very vibrant Teatrino Palazzo Grassi, which is not far from the Ponte dell’Accademia, and indeed the Teatro La Fenice itself. It’s dry but not closed. Ideal for the modern (2019) theorbo by Francisco Hervas of Granada, which Maiorana plays throughout. It’s intimate without being oppressive.

The booklet is excellent. It contains a short but informative essay by Sylvie Mamy, a specialist in Venetian music who has also written a book of interviews with Ambrosini. Maiorana takes us through the details of each piece. Brief bios of those involved are also included.

Although the closeness of the instrument to our ears is a factor in how we experience the music, there is no attempt to create a mood or an atmosphere – for the sake of either. Rather, from perhaps starting out as a study in what the lute can do, then passing through a striking range of techniques and sounds, the whole ends up as a coherent and holistic set of pieces that affect us in multiple ways. They invite us, for instance, to place intimate plucked string music in the context of an environment (Venice) which is still – just – as colourful, alert and unselfconsciously positive. Or they ask us to listen as pure string sound.

This mix, then, of seventeenth and twenty-first century lute music works so well because it is played with great sensitivity and assurance by the highly-qualified and gifted Maiorana. Not only does the focused and communicative performance of each number itself draw out all the characteristics of Baroque and contemporary plucked string playing in ways that would delight anyone new to either repertoire for its sheer brilliance and control. But Maiorana’s project also unobtrusively suggests links in purpose and direction of Kapsberger and Ambrosini for those who – perhaps – already appreciate the world, the very varied world, of the theorbo.

Mark Sealey

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Contents
Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger (1580-1651)
Untitled (I)
Corrente
Toccata I
Gagliarda
Untitled (II)
Ricerchata
Aria Veneziana
Libro IV d’intavolatura di chitarrone: Battaglia
Toccata II
Romanesche
Claudio Ambrosini (b. 1948)
Tastata
Tastata riflessa
Toccata
Aria
Canzone
Canzone in eco
Sarabanda
Ciaccona
Ricercare
Arpeggiata
Sound pictures of Venice (edited by Andrea Dandolo)
At the Murazzi, Ancient Sea Fortifications
Steps Into the Flood (Aquagranda 2019)
Gondolas Moored at the Biennale Gardens
Moored Cruise Ships
High Tide in St. Mark’s Square, Bells and Chorus of Seagulls
Children at the Frari (Tomb of Monteverdi)