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1612 Italian Vespers

The programme of this CD was performed live in the Albert Hall (conducted by me) as part of the 2012 BBC Proms. The CD became Gramophone’s disc of the month and was shortlisted for a Gramophone award.

It is the first recording of an important post-Monteverdi Vespers collection of Vesper Psalms for four choirs by Lodovico Viadana. My orchestration of the work was made according to contemporary style but also following the composer’s specific advice in his preface from 1612. The expressive heart of the work is carried by five solo singers and I ornamented these according to contemporary style, using Caccini and Monteverdi as primary models.

The CD includes the first recording of certain works by Barbarino and Soriano.

The Magnificat by Giovanni Gabrieli in 28 parts was reconstructed for the recording from only eight extant parts. Such a task would normally involve too much guesswork to be academically ‘valid’ but the surviving parts include intriguing clues: fragments of echoes, a peculiarly placed general pause, a military-style ‘call’ and the constant repetition of a phrase of text not usually repeated. These, combined with historical context, gave rise to the supposition that the piece was one of a corpus of works celebrating the Battle of Lepanto, 1571. This allowed daring but stylistic interpretations that added much character to the bare bones.

The liturgy for the recording’s proposed feast was not codified until some 60 years after the proposed date. Recreating the likely form of it involved protracted correspondence with various liturgy specialists from the UK and abroad.

The CD booklet includes much more detailed information about the process while we also set up a dedicated website <www.ifagiolini.com/1612> as a venue for follow-up research.