Crescendo Magazine
Interpretation: 9/10; sound: 8.5/10. The reviewer praises Fagiani’s rhythmic vitality and colourful organ playing.
Read the review ↗ - Crescendo Magazine
Da Vinci Classics
Physical and Digital Release: 22 April 2022
Eugenio Maria Fagiani explores the seeds of Romanticism in Italy through the organ, tracing a musical world in which established traditions meet changing expressive ambitions.
13.47€
Digital programme · 15 tracks
Track timings refer to the digital edition.
Eugenio Maria Fagiani: Renowned internationally for his impressive, enthralling and vibrant musical language, the Italian organist Eugenio Maria Fagiani performs regularly on the most important instruments in Europe, Russia, Middle East and Northern America such as Notre Dame de Paris (F), Berlin’s Dom (D), St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York (US), Tchaikovsky's Great Hall in Moscow (RU), the Royal Albert Hall in London (UK), Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore in Firenze (I). the Hofkirche St. Leodegar in Luzern (CH), the St. James Anglican Cathedral in Toronto (CDN), the Skt. Florian Stiftsbasilika (A), the Basilica of the Annunciation in Nazareth (IL). Besides his activity as a soloist, he holds a long term collaboration with the Orchestra Sinfonica di Milano La Verdi (since 2010) and the Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini (since 2020), and has been directed by eminent conductors as Jeffrey Tate, Riccardo Chailly, Xian Zhang, Claus-Peter Flor, Jens Georg Bachmann, John Axelrod, Missak Baghboudarian, Yusuke Kumehara, Giuseppe Grazioli, Daniel Kawka and Alpesh Chauhan. Celebrated as “the wizard of improvisation”, he’s also a fine composer. His works are now part of the repertoire of some of the most prestigious artists of our time as David Briggs and Stephen Tharp. Since 2008 he is the Organist of the Franciscan Shrine of La Verna, Arezzo (IT). Eugenio is the Artistic Director of the Festival Internazionale di Musica d’Organo de La Verna and the Festival Organistico “S.Donato” in the Arezzo’s Dome, and also since 2016 the Artistic Advisor of the Terra Sancta Organ Festival, across seven countries in the Middle-East region, organized by the Custody of the Holy Land. He is invited to hold masterclasses (both in Interpretation and Improvisation) and lectures for several top-class music institutions around Europe and North America such as the Cambridge University Organ Scolar’s Forum (UK), the RCCO, Toronto (CDN). He is also invited to serve as juror in international competitions. He records with: VDE-Gallo, Spektral Records, Fugatto, Da Vinci and Decca.
Antonio Botti was a composer represented in the Ricasoli Collection, a body of music associated with musical life in eighteenth-century Tuscany. His keyboard music includes an Overtura for organ, recorded by Eugenio Maria Fagiani in 1815: Seeds of Romanticism in Italy.
Gaetano Donizetti (Bergamo, 29 November 1797–8 April 1848) was an Italian composer whose operas helped shape the bel canto repertory of the nineteenth century. He achieved international success in both comic and serious opera, developing a personal dramatic language between the operatic worlds of Rossini and Verdi.
Born into a family of modest means, he received his early musical education at the charitable school established in Bergamo by Simon Mayr, who remained his teacher, mentor and supporter. Mayr arranged further study with Stanislao Mattei in Bologna. Donizetti’s first professional operatic commission, Enrico di Borgogna, was performed in Venice in 1818. Following the success of Zoraida di Granata in Rome, he began working in Naples in 1822, maintaining a demanding succession of commissions while also writing for other Italian theatres.
Anna Bolena established his international reputation in 1830. The following decade brought such enduring works as L’elisir d’amore, Lucrezia Borgia and Lucia di Lammermoor. His writing combines melodic immediacy with a keen understanding of theatrical pace, character and vocal expression. Close collaboration with singers was central to his working methods. Although exceptionally prolific, he continually adapted his musical and dramatic approach to the requirements of different theatres, performers and audiences.
His later career extended to Paris and Vienna, with operas including La fille du régiment, La favorite, Linda di Chamounix and Don Pasquale. Alongside his operas, he composed sacred music, songs, orchestral pieces and chamber works, including string quartets and music for wind instruments. Serious illness curtailed his final years, and he returned to Bergamo before his death in 1848. His elder brother Giuseppe, a military musician who worked in Constantinople, was a different composer.
Gaetano Valerj (1760-1822), also known as Gaetano Valeri, was an Italian organist and composer associated with Padua. His keyboard and sacred music combines Classical forms with the melodic grace and ornamentation of the galant style. His organ works form an important part of his surviving output.
Gasparo Sborgi (1737-1819) was an Italian composer and keyboard musician associated with Florence and the Tuscan court. His surviving music includes works for organ and harpsichord. Manuscripts preserved in the Ricasoli Collection include the organ Mass in D major represented in Eugenio Maria Fagiani's recording 1815: Seeds of Romanticism in Italy.
Giovanni Morandi: Morandi was born in Pergola (1777), and died in Senigallia (1856), Italy. He was the most-important Italian composer of organ music in the first half of the 19th century, and was an early mentor of Gioachino Rossini.
Padre Davide da Bergamo (1791-1863), born Felice Moretti in Zanica, was an Italian Franciscan friar, organist and composer. He entered the convent of Santa Maria di Campagna in Piacenza in 1818 and became renowned for an organ style shaped by the orchestral and operatic language of his time. His extensive sacred and organ output made him a central figure in nineteenth-century Italian organ culture.
Pietro Ceracchini was an eighteenth-century composer whose organ music survives in the Ricasoli Collection. Offertorio, Elevazione, Post Communio and Toccata from his Mass in C major are included in Eugenio Maria Fagiani's 1815: Seeds of Romanticism in Italy. These works document the relationship between liturgical keyboard music and Italian instrumental style.
1815: Seeds of Romanticism in Italy 1815 was a crucial year not only for the Old Continent, but also for the Italian history. In June 1815, after the battle of Waterloo (Belgium), the last troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte were annihilated by the British and Prussian army, headed by Wellington and Blücher. In the same year in November France had to gave Savoy in to the Kingdom of Sardinia, that enlarged their boundaries by including the former Ligurian Republic as well. The European political setup changed, the Congress of Vienna…
1815: Seeds of Romanticism in Italy
1815 was a crucial year not only for the Old Continent, but also for the Italian history. In June 1815, after the battle of Waterloo (Belgium), the last troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte were annihilated by the British and Prussian army, headed by Wellington and Blücher. In the same year in November France had to gave Savoy in to the Kingdom of Sardinia, that enlarged their boundaries by including the former Ligurian Republic as well. The European political setup changed, the Congress of Vienna “restored” the balance between the five main power holders – “Pentarchy”- Russia, Austria, Prussia (Eastern conservator block) and France with Great Britain (Western liberal block) that – for the sake of simplification – established a mutual cooperation, under the name of “Holy Alliance” (a union France and Great Britain soon would sidestep from).
Revolutionaries and reactionaries, progressive and conservators – before and after the (napoleonic) Empire – permeated the Italian territory, that earlier on in 1820 saw the rise of the first Secret Societies, like the Carbonari.
It is undeniable that in this composite historical period – ranging from Napoleon to the first Risorgimento (“resurgence”) germs – the Belpaese was pervaded by the French-Prussian culture.
Though led by the desire of independence and reappropriation of the “native soil”, the “Italian” musicians that lived in those years could “absorb” the great works of the Viennese Classicism (especially Haydn and Mozart, but also Beethoven) made available by the music publishers, maturing a personal musical style – not necessarily by the means of opera – where the “spirito Galante” encounters the Classicism and spreads the seeds for a first Italian Romanticism.
1815 is also the building year of the organ – opus 351 by the Bergamo organ builders Fratelli Serassi, designed for the parish church in Calcinate, Bergamo – chosen, surely not by accident, by Eugenio Maria Fagiani to exemplify his musical excursus. A rarely frequented repertoire, that walks through the main organ building and music schools in Italy: the Lombard-Venetian, the Tuscan and the Marchigiana.
Padre Davide da Bergamo – aka Felice Moretti (1791-1863) – is probably the most renowned author and the one that is naturally complementary to the Serassi organs typology. Instruments gifted by several concerto stops, an unique glass-like Ripieno (mixtures) sound and a set of special effective stops as the Campanelli (little bells in the treble part of the keyboard) as well percussions as cymbals, bass drum, snare drums, timpani.
The Calcinate instrument was inaugurated by Johann Simon Mayr (1763-1845) – naturalized Bergamo citizen, who was the teacher of P. Davide and Gaetano Donizetti (1797-1863), one of the prominent musicians of the first half of the XIX century – and as well a prolific opera composer, descendant and spreader of the Viennese symphonic tradition.
Thanks to his highly renowned music mastership in Bergamo – and not only – the great sacred compositions by Haydn spread. The music imprinting received by Mayr was also transferred to his wide number of students.
The Concertino in do maggiore by Padre Davide – somehow approachable to the Flotenkonzert by J. C. H. Rinck (1770-1846) – shows a clearly classic formal structure: a first tempo di Concerto for solo instrument and orchestra, with Cadenza! The Flutta (the “transverse flute” stop, which takes its name from the Italianization of the French name Flute), accompanied by the Viola; the orchestral refrains are rendered with the organ Tutti.
Another concertante piece – as if it were the slow, and really cantabile, movement of a sonata – is the Elevazione con tromba obbligata.
An exquisite and simple Pastorale [A 531] from 1813 is presented by Donizetti, passed down as a manuscript and preserved at the Bergamo Museo Donizettiano’s Archive.
The Venetian School is represented by one Sonata by the Paduan composer Gaetano Valeri (1760-1822).
The galante and sophisticated breath together with the pathetism of the Voce Umana stop with her Sicilian tempo recreate, in a very clever way, the fortunate bipartite mono thematic Sonata form, which was so important to Domenico Scarlatti.
The Calcinate Serassi – a monumental instrument. Endowed with two keyboards, a real 32 feet stop in the bass section, as well a facade that shows the 16 feet pipes – was enlarged several times by the same organ builders, who added a thunderous Banda militare stop, a very particular instruments ensemble that includes Gran Cassa (Bass drum), Sistro (a set of little bells), Piatto (Cimbal) and Rullo (snare drum) playing all together.
The brilliant works by the Marche composer Giovanni Morandi (1777-1856) – Offertorio in fa minore, Rondo’ con imitazione dei campanelli, Sonata (1808) – show fully the colorful timbres palette, often enriched by the Banda instruments, of a really unique organ.
The school of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany completes and magnifies the musical focus, centered on so a special year – 1815 – that was able to conjugate peculiar aesthetical perspectives, to be found in a single instrument: the synthesis of two centuries (18th and 19th) that, confronting each other, eagerly melt together.
The almost unknown names of Pietro Ceracchini (18th), Gasparo Sborgi (1737-1819) e Antonio Botti (1766-1799) were preserved, so far, in the manuscripts of the so called “Collezione Ricasoli”: about 400 music compositions – collected between 1720 and 1850 by the noble Florentine family Ricasoli – recovered back from the Louisville (Kentucky) University music library in 1980. This collection includes a wide spectrum of music (operatic works, oratorios, masses, organ music, sacred and profane chants, ballet music, symphonies, concertos, sonatas for keyboard, chamber music etc.) by several musicians who worked, or was familiar, for the Grand Duke Pietro Leopoldo D’Asburgo Lorena and performed not only at the Duchy court, but also in churches and on stages in Florence. The two manuscript works here presented, except for the Overtura by Botti, belong to movements chosen from two different Masses for solo organ: Offertorio, Elevazione, Post Communio and Toccata from the Messa in Do maggiore by Ceracchini; Offertorio, Elevazione e Post Communio from the Messa in Re maggiore by Sborgi.
Michele Bosio © 2022
Selected awards, reviews and interviews. Radio broadcasts and podcasts are listed separately below.
Crescendo Magazine
Interpretation: 9/10; sound: 8.5/10. The reviewer praises Fagiani’s rhythmic vitality and colourful organ playing.
Read the review ↗ - Crescendo MagazineBresciaoggi
“la bella collezione di Fagiani”
A positive account of Eugenio Maria Fagiani’s exploration of early Italian Romantic organ repertoire. Published in the newspaper’s classical record column.
Klassiek Centraal
A warm recommendation of Fagiani’s discovery of Italian early Romantic organ repertoire.
Read the review ↗ - Klassiek Centraal
