The album’s program revolves around two interwoven musical practices that blossomed in early modern Europe: the basso ostinato and the viola bastarda. These concepts, nurtured across Italian, French, German, and Spanish traditions, illuminate how Renaissance and Baroque musicians balanced fixed structures with improvisatory freedom. A basso ostinato (Italian for “obstinate bass”) is a recurring bass line or harmonic pattern that obstinately repeats, providing a foundation over which variation and invention unfold. This device has roots deep in European music history – medieval examples can be found – but it flourished spectacularly in the 16th and 17th centuries as composers and performers from Naples to Paris embraced its potential. Instrumentalists of the late Renaissance delighted in spinning melodic variations above unchanging bass patterns, treating these repeating harmonies as a canvas for virtuosity and fancy. In Italy, such ground-bass dances as the passamezzo and romanesca became well-known frameworks for improvisation, their names traveling on manuscripts and tongues across the continent. Spain contributed its own exuberant patterns – for instance, the wild Folía (of Iberian origin) – and Spanish vihuela and guitar players cultivated the art of diferencias (variations) over ostinato basses. By the early Baroque, France had adopted the ostinato principle in the form of the chaconne and passacaille, which in the court of Louis XIV often served as grand dance finales in operas and ballets. The German lands, too, absorbed these influences: from ground-bass hymns in Lutheran settings to magnificent ostinato-driven works by Buxtehude and Pachelbel, culminating in J.S. Bach’s towering passacaglia and famous Ciaccona, which brought the genre to new heights of complexity and expressive depth. Across these regions, the basso ostinato fostered a distinctly harmonic mode of thinking – a cyclical underpinning that invited ever-new melodies and variations while the bass stubbornly repeated, thus marrying compositional structure with the spirit of improvisation.
Parallel to the bass-driven impulse of the ostinato, the viola bastarda tradition exemplifies the era’s inventive fusion of composition, transcription, and virtuosity. The term viola bastarda refers both to a type of bass viol and to a daring style of playing that was celebrated as a crowning achievement of musical Mannerism. Originating in late 16th-century Italy, this practice allowed a single bowed instrument to embody the essence of a complex polyphonic work. To play alla bastarda meant to take a choral madrigal or motet and transform it into a single, sweeping melodic line that traversed the full range of the viol, from its deepest tones to its highest register. The viola bastarda player became a one-person ensemble, deftly weaving together the original multiple voices by means of agile leaps, rapid diminutions, and elaborate ornamentation. This was virtuoso improvisation in the noblest sense: although written examples exist, contemporary accounts suggest that much of the bastarda style was extemporized, relying on the player’s ingenuity and deep harmonic understanding rather than any fully notated score. Such performances demanded a keen grasp of the underlying harmonic architecture of the piece, since the soloist had to imply or outline the chords and counterpoint while freely embellishing the melody. In effect, the viola bastarda art was a form of creative transcription – reimagining vocal polyphony for a solo instrument – and a display of idiomatic prowess, pushing the viol (and by extension, its cousin the cello) to expressive limits previously reserved for the human voice.
Taken together, the basso ostinato and viola bastarda represent a fascinating duality in European music history: one, a compositional ground that anchors flights of invention, and the other, a performative tour de force that liberates a single instrument to encompass an entire polyphonic texture. Both grew from the fertile interplay of improvisation and structure that characterized the late Renaissance’s shift into Baroque sensibilities. Both also transcended local origins to become pan-European phenomena: Italian musicians might improvise over a ruggiero ground that a German or English composer could also adopt, just as the Italian bastarda style inspired awe beyond Italy’s borders. In the program that follows, which spans Italian, French, Spanish, and German works, these historical practices are more than abstract concepts; they inform the very fabric of the music’s style and interpretation. This introductory essay thus offers a context for the listener, highlighting how obstinate basses and a bastard viol’s liberty of invention each contributed to a new musical aesthetic. It was an aesthetic in which repetition became a source of creativity, and meticulous craftsmanship went hand in hand with improvisational daring – a perfect backdrop for a solo cello journey into the heart of Baroque imagination.
DV
This recording was conceived in homage to the obstinate bass lines that haunt so much seventeenth-century music and still kindle the imagination of modern performers. Between the Renaissance and the early Baroque the cello’s ancestors-bass violin, violone, gamba-were rarely granted solo status. Yet the practice of suonare alla bastarda-leaping nimbly through every register of a polyphonic piece and compressing its strands into a single, virtuoso line-offered string players both a licence to embellish and a model for transcription. Adapting multi-voice works “to a means of performance other than that for which they were originally conceived” (to recall the classic definition of transcription) gradually encouraged a new, harmonically self-sufficient view of bowed bass instruments.
The present programme continues that tradition.Each piece shares an ostinato foundation, whether a ground bass (basso ostinato) or, in François Couperin’s Les Barricades Mystérieuses, a stubbornly reiterated chordal pattern whose unchanging rhythmic value anticipates the Prelude in G from Bach’s cello suites. Like the lexical root of ostinato-“a person who persists with stubborn tenacity despite contrary evidence”-the performer approaches the cello not merely as a melodic voice but as a harmonic universe compressed into four strings. The inclusion of the Southern Italian folk song Montanara di Carpino, itself spun over a repeating bass, highlights the deep affinity between learned and oral traditions and testifies to a repertoire that transcends geographic and social boundaries.
I came to love, study, and elaborate this music through the generous guidance of Lucia Tamburino, Enrico Onofri, Paolo Beschi, and Giancarlo Rado. Some transcriptions derive from original sources in two upper voices plus bass, others from a single melodic line with continuo, and still others from purely instrumental prints. All are offered here in the bastarda spirit: one instrument, many voices, unbroken imagination.
By embracing both the obstinate and the inventive, this album situates the cello in its dual role as singer and continuo, reviving a centuries-old freedom to roam across registers, traditions, and borders while remaining forever tethered to the ground.
Andrea Falconieri
Ciaccona; Passacaglia
A Neapolitan lutenist who later served as maestro di cappella to the Spanish viceroy in Naples, Falconieri absorbed both Italian and Iberian idioms. Dance rhythms, flexible phrasing, and instrumental virtuosity mark his Il primo libro di Canzone, Sinfonie, Fantasie, Capricci, Brandi, Correnti, Gagliarde, Alemane, Volte per Violini e Viole ouero altro Stromento a uno, due e tre con il Basso Continuo (1650), from which these two ostinato-based pieces are drawn.
Diego Ortiz
Ricercata prima; Ricercata seconda
Composer – theorist to the Spanish viceroys in Naples, Ortiz published Trattado de glosas (1553), the first manual of ornamentation for bowed strings. His ricercate, originally didactic, invite extempore diminutions that translate naturally into a bastarda-style cello idiom.
Marco Uccellini
Aria sopra la Bergamasca
As capo degl’instrumentisti at the Este court in Modena, Uccellini championed the emerging sonata. His infectious Bergamasca alternates lively dance strains over an unrelenting ground, epitomising the sectional, contrast-rich construction of mid-seventeenth-century instrumental music.
Tarquinio Merula
Ciaccona
A native of Busseto who flourished chiefly in Cremona yet gravitated stylistically toward the Venetian school, Merula applied the newest expressive devices-including bold chromaticism and intense rhythmic drive-to both sacred and secular genres. His Ciaccona, the piece No. 20 published in Canzoni overo sonate concertate per chiesa e camera, Op. 12 (1637) exemplifies that progressive credo.
Anonymous Italian
Una ciaccona; An Italian Ground
These anonymous grounds survive in Neapolitan manuscript miscellanies. Though their provenance remains obscure, their inventive variations and cantabile lines suggest close kinship with the cultivated repertoire performed in aristocratic salons.
Esaias Reusner
Passacaglia
Silesian lutenist Reusner served Duke Georg III of Brieg and later the Prussian court. Delitiæ testudinis (1667) and Neue Lauten-Früchte (1676) contain some of the era’s most elaborate solo-lute passacaglie; the present transcription preserves their ornamental filigree while exploiting the cello’s resonance.
François Couperin
Les barricades mystérieuses
Published in Pièces de clavecin (Book II, 1717), this enigmatic rondeau relies on a ceaseless sequence of suspensions whose metric ostinato anticipates later cello preludes. Transcribed here, its veiled harmonies reveal unexpected depth when sustained by gut strings and low register.
Johann Heinrich Schmelzer
Ciaccona
Court violinist to Emperor Leopold I, Schmelzer advanced violin technique and helped codify the Austrian sonata. His Ciaccona, originally composed in A major juxtaposes rustic dance gestures with courtly elegance, its expansive variation cycle ideal for bastarda exploration.
Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber
Passacaglia
The closing piece of Biber’s Mystery Sonatas (c. 1676), this monumental passacaglia was among the earliest virtuoso works for solo violin. Its pregnant four-note bass, here transferred to the cello, underpins a spiritual meditation that rises from earthly tread to transcendent lyricism.
Michel Richard Delalande
Chaconne
Attributed to Delalande, principal chapel composer to Louis XIV and renowned for his grands motets and the Symphonies pour les soupers du Roy, this Chaconne embodies the splendour of Versailles through the refined structure of a ground bass enriched by ornate writing.
The score was directly handed to the performer without further contextual details, and at present it is not possible to determine with certainty to which of Delalande’s known works it may correspond.
Nicola Matteis
Diverse bizzarrie sopra la Ciaccona
The Neapolitan violin virtuoso who astonished Restoration London (“he seemed to be inspired and played such ravishing things on a ground,” wrote John Evelyn) published four books of Ayres. These “bizarre” variations transform the conventional ciaccona into a dazzling sequence of rhetorical flourishes.
Traditional
Montanara di Carpino
Collected by Diego Carpitella, Alan Lomax, and Roberto Leydi, this Gargano-area love song circulates in myriad versions yet invariably clings to its insistent basso ostinato. Its appearance here affirms the porous boundary between cultivated artifice and living folk practice-between notation and memory.
Enrico Sorbello