Alessandro Scarlatti (1660-1725)
Christmas at the Bethlehem of the West – Music from Santa Maria Maggiore, Rome
Messa per il Santissimo Natale (1707)
Beata Mater (1707)
Non so qual più m’ingombra (1716)
O magnum mysterium (1707)
Giovani Giorgi (late 17th century – 1762)
Messa a quattro concertata con violini per la notte di Natale
Carlotta Colombo (soprano)
Coro e Orchestra Ghislieri/Giulio Prandi
Latin and Italian texts included with English translations
rec. 2025, Sala della Carità, Padua, Italy
Arcana 587 [69]
The music on this disc is connected by the fact that it was written by two composers – albeit at slightly different periods – both for the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome, and also for the liturgical season of Christmas. That connection is not made randomly since the church is associated with the Nativity story on account of holding the relic of the Christ child’s crib, as well as being built on the site where a miracle apparently occurred, of snow falling during a night in August. One of the four major basilicas of Rome, it came to wider attention earlier this year as the church where Pope Francis chose to be buried, rather than at the Vatican.
A Mass by each of the two composers are the major works on the programme. Scarlatti’s is nominally the grander, scored for nine voices spread across two choirs, but with singers one to a part and a small instrumental ensemble in accompaniment the atmosphere here is more of intimate sacred chamber music. Perhaps accidentally, rather than deliberately, that impression is underlined by the arrangement of the performers that doesn’t quite capture any antiphonal exchanges between the two choirs, although some singers happen to seem more recessed in the overall sound than others. Nevertheless, the brightly sustained violins of the Orchestra Ghislieri and often yearning lines from the sopranos create a sonic effect as though a halo of light. Giulio Prandi sets off a real crackle of excitement and expectation with his forces in the first Kyrie, and in the Gloria. The Mass concludes with a serene Agnus Dei where the gently held long notes by the sopranos over the rest of the choral texture recalls the equivalent movement in the same composer’s much more extensive setting, the Messa di Santa Cecilia.
After the reserved unfolding of the Kyrie in the stile antico which opens Giorgi’s Mass, the Gloria bursts forth all the more jubilantly with a florid, operatically delivered solo, decorated by wiry, filigree violins, and bolstered with two or three singers in the conventionally scored four-part chorus. They maintain a mood of cheer and optimism for the Sanctus and Agnus Dei with a broad-toned brightness, though the ‘Crucifixus’ of the Credo has some searing suspensions that wouldn’t be out of place in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater. The character of Christmas comes through with the pastoral music which Giorgi sets to the ‘Domine Deus’ section of the Gloria, and ‘Qui propter nos homines’ in the Credo, the former with an expressive solo from countertenor Maximiliano Baños, the latter section also sung with rapture as the mystery of the incarnation is recounted.
Scarlatti’s sacred cantata for solo soprano ‘Non so qual più m’ingombra’ offers a more personal perspective upon the wonder of the Nativity, the theology of that mystery of light born into darkness conveyed as though an extended operatic scena of two recitative-aria pairs, like the composer’s many secular cantatas. Carlotta Colombo sings with a mellifluous clarity in the Handelian first aria, and attends to the pastoral tone of the second with suitable reverence, while lively strings evoke the dazzle of illumination. There’s a radiant stillness in tone and volume for the two motets by Scarlatti, both also in the stile antico and sung by the choir alone with discreet neutral-sounding organ accompaniment, and sounding more like the music of Palestrina over one hundred years previously.
As the year that commemorates the tercentenary of Scarlatti’s death draws to a close, this disc casts a stimulating angle upon the composer’s still too little-known output as well as making an edifying contribution to the Christmas season. It’s also worth having for what is claimed to be the world premiere recording of Giorgi’s Mass.
Curtis Rogers
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