Dall'Abaco, Barrière, Marcello: A Tre, Baroque Music for Cello Trio

Alma Stolte specialises in the historical cello and viola da gamba and is in demand throughout Germany and beyond. After Ludger Rémy gave her the first impulses in continuo playing and baroque cello during her studies in Dresden, she continued her early music studies in Amsterdam and Berlin. Alma Stolte is a cellist of the Dresdner Barockorchester and regularly performs with ensembles such as lautten compagney Berlin, Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin, Le Concert Lorrain, Dresdner Kapellsolisten and Dresdner Kammerchor. As a continuo cellist and chamber music partner, her concerts have taken her to important venues across Europe, such as Opéra Royale de Versailles, Semperoper Dresden, Teatro Olimpico Vicenza, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonie Luxembourg, Arsenal Metz and Konserthus Bodø.
Besides her creative work with tiefsaits, she discovers new musical paths for the cello in the symbiosis of jazz, indie and chamber music with her band Nouk.
www.almastolte.com

Anna Reisener studied baroque cello, modern cello and viola da gamba in Bremen, Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Berlin. She regularly performs with baroque orchestras from Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.
In addition to numerous masterclasses, she broadened her studies as a member of the European Union Baroque Orchestra and the Collegium Vocale Gent Academy.
Diverse musical projects have already taken her to important international concert venues such as the Muziekgebouw aan't IJ Amsterdam, the Wigmore Hall London, the Royal Opera House Versailles, the AMUZ Antwerp, LA Opera (Los Angeles), as well as major festivals such as Leipzig Bach Festival, Felix! Festival at Cologne Philharmonie, Bucharest Early Music Festival, York Early Music Festival and Herrenchiemsee Festival.
www.annareisener-cello.de

Mirjam-Luise Münzel studied recorder, baroque cello and viola da gamba in Bremen, Seville, London and Berlin. She is a winner of the int. Biagio Marini Competition, was Handel House Young Artist and Young Artist at the Brighton Early Music Festival, and was awarded 3rd prize at the international Moeck/SRP competition in London and the Concours international de la musique ancienne Paris. She performs internationally at venues and festivals such as the Wigmore Hall London, Concertgebouw Amsterdam, Palace of the Grand Dukes Vilnius, English National Opera, Thomaskirche Leipzig, Palace de Versailles, Musica Antica Brugge, Oude Muziek Utrecht, Felix! Festival of the Kölner Philharmonie, Ketevan Festival India, Bach Biennale Weimar and the London Festival of Baroque Music. Mirjam-Luise has created and led numerous interdisciplinary projects. She teaches recorder at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama London and the University of the Arts Bremen. www.mirjamluisemuenzel.com

Anna Reisener, Alma Stolte, Mirjam-Luise Münzel
historical cellos

Tiefsaits is a young Berlin ensemble that specialises in historical low string instruments such as the baroque cello, viola da gamba and violoncello piccolo. The three musicians dedicate themselves to a wide-ranging repertoire, from Renaissance consort to high Baroque sonatas and virtuoso music of the Romantic period. They explore the possibilities of low three-part ensemble sound and the multifaceted role of the cello throughout the centuries.
tiefsaits presents rarely heard original works as well as their own arrangements in their performances. Although the ensemble adopts a historical perspective, there are always references to current social and philosophical issues in their programmes as well as collaborations with contemporary composers. For example, they address the climate crisis in Cassandra's Voice, the individual experience of time in Stolen Time which included premiered works by composer Friedemann Stolte and an interdisciplinary collaboration with a Berlin independent cinema, or Last Words in collaboration with vocal ensemble Ælbgut which intertwined different musical languages and put works by Monteverdi and Schütz side by side with contemporary works by Reena Esmail. One of their own most successful arrangements is an adaption of the Suite in d minor for solo cello by J. S. Bach set for cello trio. tiefsaits` artistic work and research is regularly funded by institutions such as the Berliner Senat, Kulturfunke Lübeck or the German Orchestra Foundation. Performances include AEQUINOX festival, Int. Schützfest, Int. Telemannfesttage or Quedlinburger Musiksommer. À TRE is their debut album.
www.tiefsaits.com

Benedetto Marcello: (b Venice, 24 June or 24 July 1686; d Brescia, 24 July 1739). Italian composer and writer. The son of a Venetian nobleman, he followed the career path of all Venetian nobles of his time: he was admitted to the Maggior Consiglio of the Republic on 4 December 1706 and, after completing studies in literature and law, served in various magistracies over the next two decades. The last decade of his life is riddled with mysteries: he married the commoner Rosanna Scalfi, his singing pupil, in May 1728; had a religious experience in August of the same year; was exiled to the Istrian city of Pula (then part of the Venetian Republic) for three years (1730–33) as provincial governor; was absent from civic records for the next five years; and received his final appointment in Brescia as chief financial officer.

It is not easy to segment the musical continuum of Marcello’s life, since he held no regular appointments of a musical nature and the majority of his musical works are undated. This demonstrates how severely separated in social experience dilettante composers were from the common ranks of musical maestri. Nonetheless, Marcello’s cultivated intellect exerted, particularly through his psalm settings and cantatas, a major influence on Italian musical thought and performance throughout the 18th century and, to various degrees, on the musical practices of many other European countries until the end of the 19th century. After a perfunctory involvement with instrumental music, his main interests as a composer, particularly between 1710 and 1720, were the cantata and the chamber duet. Thereafter, his attention turned to works on a larger scale: the 50 Psalms of David, the serenata and the oratorio. The claim that Marcello forwent composition after 1728 cannot be entirely true since two of his oratorios neatly circumscribed his years in Pula.

Marcello’s intent in his Salmi, which were published with etchings by Sebastiano Ricci, was to restore dignity to devotional music by reviving musical practices of antiquity (seeillustration). They are set in texturally differentiated sections and are for the most part through-composed. Numerous testimonials (by Gasparini, Antonio and Giovanni Bononcini, Sarri, Mattheson and Telemann) were included in each of the eight volumes. Caldara, who found the music ‘eccentric’, was one of Marcello’s few detractors. Later Italians, in particular Padre Martini and Giovenale Sacchi, revered Marcello’s Salmias models of contrapuntal writing. Still more accomplished examples are the six-voice canon In omnem terram, published with the psalms, and the four-voice Missa Clementina, which Marcello composed for his admission to the Accademia Filarmonica, Bologna, in 1711. Being impressed with the fact that women were not permitted to sing in the ancient temple, Marcello favoured low, mainly male, voices in his psalms. Some 16 of the works incorporate sections based on quotations from Greek and Hebrew psalmody; the original sources are interpolated at the appropriate points. Like his secular vocal music of the 1720s, which is inspired by Roman and Greek epics, the melodic content varies from an ambitus which is very restricted to one which is almost impossibly broad, expressing emotional peaks and depths.

In the 1710s, when Marcello was coaching the young Faustina Bordoni and writing music for Roman nobles, such as the Borghese family, he led, in parallel with Apostolo Zeno’s attempted reform of the opera libretto, a movement to reform singing style. Here his goal was to remove ‘tasteless’ ornamentation and to focus more on actual sound. In this phase of his life, his vocal music was much more lyrical and formally structured. Several of his chamber duets were composed for Laura and Virginia Predieri. The vast majority of his lyrical cantatas seem to have been written for performances at weekly academies (social gatherings of the nobility that featured poetry, music, oratory and debate). The texts, many of which were written by the composer, were usually pastoral. Mattheson praised the rhetorical detail of Marcello’s approach to the setting of (lyrical) aria texts. More original are Marcello’s intensely dramatic cantatas on tragic and heroic subjects from antiquity, which feature such figures as Andromeda, Arianna, Cleopatra, Dido, Medea and Timothy (probably mediated through the dramas of Corneille and Racine). Some of these works lack arias: others use abberations of musical notation to express a heroine’s (or hero’s) mental frenzy or anguish. Although the subject matter is again usually from antiquity, Marcello’s serenatas are somewhat more conventional and use obbligato instruments and instrumental figuration to reinforce images and to convey elements of the drama.

The lighter side of Marcello’s nature was expressed in his several satires. Of prime importance among these is the treatise Il teatro alla moda, first published anonymously in 1720, which is concerned especially with the decline of careful composition and well-rehearsed performance, as well as the invasion of Bolognese singers, at the Teatro S Angelo, Venice. It was especially popular in Italy in the 18th century, in France in the 19th, and in Germany in the early 20th, and it appears never to have been out of print from the time of its writing to the present. Comic musical works include the letter cantata Carissima figlia (1718), in which the singing styles of such opera figures as Vittoria Tesi, Faustina Bordoni and Gaetano Berenstadt are imitated; the castrato madrigals, in which it is debated whether the divinity of the singing of (adult) male sopranos and altos can save them from eternal damnation (1715); and the comic intermezzos Spago e Filetta (?1719). Although Marcello’s two late oratorios are not satirical works, a playful mood prevails.

The impetus for the keyboard and recorder sonatas is likely to have come from academies. While the Marcello family had one of its own on the Fondamenta Nuove in Venice, Benedetto seems to have maintained a network of contacts in Rome, Florence, Bologna and various rural retreats in the Veneto. Only the motivation for composing the Concerti op.1, remains unaccounted for. These works now lack the principal violin part and so accurate evaluation is impossible. Within this opus was the one piece by Marcello known to, and transcribed by, Bach. Of Marcello’s keyboard works, the sonatas are the most important, for they seem to have played a role in the establishment of the genre as it was later developed by Platti, Pescetti, Galuppi and J.C. Bach. His cello sonatas, which are among his most widely performed works today, were probably composed much earlier than their date of publication suggests and, in fact, their authenticity is not beyond question.

Marcello’s legacy was greatest for those who lived between 1750 and 1875, when recognition of his Salmi led to their translation into many other languages (French, German, Swedish, English, Russian) and their performance, as liturgically generic sacred works, in a host of different liturgical contexts. It was during this period that a great number of the manuscripts in which Marcello’s secular works are now preserved seem to have been copied. In the 19th century the Salmi were sometimes divided into short ‘motets’ or ‘songs’, or stripped of their texts and offered as instrumental works, or retexted and offered as ‘new’ works. Such varieties of psalm progeny seem to number well beyond 10,000 (arrangers included Paer, Mayr, Rossini and Bizet; Verdi was a great enthusiast). Another work of the same period, the oratorio Joaz, is reckoned to have anticipated the reforms of Gluck many years later. Marcello’s call to restore the classical virtue of ‘noble simplicity’ in music, found in the preface to his Salmi, anticipates the analogous invitation of the German archaeologist Winkelmann (who spoke of sculpture) by 30 years. Although little noted today, Marcello’s role in formulating the values of classicism and promoting their musical implementation was his most significant contribution to cultural history. His influence was enormously, if subtly, pervasive.

Differing national values coloured perceptions of Marcello’s music: the English revered its ‘harmony’, the Germans its ‘melody’ and the Italians its ‘counterpoint’. It was only in the 20th century that Marcello’s name started to fall from grace in lists of important composers in the past. Even as this change occurred, however, the influence of his Salmi was regenerated in ethnomusicology: the materials Marcello quoted from Judaic and Hellenic traditions in the 1720s are frequently requoted (often without attribution) in studies of ancient and oriental music. He undoubtedly would have been amused by the reflexive nature of the esteem that accrued to his work after his death.

Giuseppe Clemente dall'Abaco
(b Brussels, bap. 27 March 1710; d Arbizzano di Valpolicella, 31 Aug 1805). Flemish composer and cellist of Italian descent, son of Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco. He was at first a pupil of his father, with whom his career has often been confused. The latter, employed at the Munich court, apparently sent his son to Venice to further his musical education; but on his return the young man could not find work in Bavaria, and on 29 March 1729 he joined the electoral chapel at Bonn as Titular-Kammerdiener und Hofmusikus mit dem Violoncell. On 26 August 1738 he was appointed director of the court chamber orchestra. In spite of his Bonn appointment he was able to travel, going to London and other English towns in 1740, and apparently to Vienna in 1749 when a work by him for five cellos was performed. In 1753 he left the court to go to Verona. He seems to have remained in contact with the Munich court, and on 22 September 1766 (VannesD) was created a baron. He died on his estate in Arbizzano di Valpolicella at the age of 95.

Dall'Abaco's cello sonatas, despite the advent of the new galant and pre-Classical styles, retain the gravity of the Baroque and the broad melodic span inherited, through his father, from Legrenzi, Bassani, Vitali and Lully (nearly 40, including many autograph and a few anonymous ones, are in GB-Lbl, three in D-Bsb and one in A-Wgm; he also wrote a cantata for the Bonn court, apparently now lost). His reputation, however, was mainly as an instrumentalist, and his fame as a composer did not match his father's. (M. Marsigny: Joseph Clemens Dall’Abaco (v.1708–1805) et la sonate pour violoncelle au 18e siècle, diss., U. of Louvain-la-Neuve, 1980)

Jean Barrière
(b Bordeaux, 2 May 1707; d Paris, 6 June 1747). French composer and cellist. He probably lived in Bordeaux since at his death he was cited as a ‘négociant de la ville de Bordeaux’, and after his death a privilege was granted to a ‘Sr Francois Barrière, prestre prébendier de l'église de Bordeaux, pour des Sonates et autres ouvrages de musique instrumentale du feu Jean Barrière’. In 1730 he lived in Paris as a Musicien ordinaire de notre Académie Royale de Musique. In 1733 he was granted a privilege for six years to publish ‘plusieurs Sonates et autres ouvrages de musique instrumentale’. According to Fétis, he went to Rome in 1736 to study with the famous Italian cellist Francesco Alborea, called Francischello. He remained in Italy for three years, but probably did not study with Francischello, who was employed by the court in Vienna from 1726 until his death in 1739. Barrière returned to Paris in 1739 and continued composing for the cello: ‘Le Sieur Barrière, de retour d'Italie à Paris, vient de faire graver son troisième livre de Sonates pour le Violoncelle’ (Mercure de France, November 1739). In 1739 his privilege was renewed for 12 years, and during that time he published his last three books – one each for cello, pardessus de viole and harpsichord.