Up to 30% off Brilliant Classics

CD 15 + CD-ROM

A release of great importance: the first time CD-issue of the Complete Works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. The importance of Frescobaldi cannot be overrated: the Italian Renaissance master influenced a whole generation after him in the development of instrumental composition: his magnificent keyboard works are rich, virtuosic and grand in form, and have served as model for many composers after him (Froberger, J.S. Bach, Purcell, to name a few).

The CD’s in this edition are all newly recorded, by the foremost scholar/musicians of Italy, using period instruments.

Another spectacular “Integrale” by Brilliant Classics, a worthy successor of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff, Corelli.... Free CD-ROM included containing liner notes written by leading musicologists, and the complete texts of the vocal music.

Frescobaldi was the most influential composer for keyboard in Italy prior to Domenico Scarlatti. Bach copied out Frescobaldi’s Fiori Musicali, and he was also a strong influence on Fux and Buxtehude. His reputation has been slow to gain its rightful status over the past century or so.

This edition provides a superb opportunity to discover this neglected master of the Baroque. The project is masterminded by the harpsichordist and organist Roberto Loreggian, and previous individual volumes of the series have been well received. This is there first ever complete edition of Frescobaldi’s music to be issued: a landmark on record, sure to be widely noticed by the musical press.

The last, separate, installment of the Complete Frescobaldi Edition, one of the gems of the Brilliant Classics Integrales Series. Roberto Loreggian, the originator and key performer of the project, in his role as soloist, playing the Canzoni Francese and the Fantasias. Excellent liner notes by a Frescobaldi scholar. The end of a much acclaimed and highly praised series.

Girolamo Frescobaldi was the most significant figure in Italian keyboard music before Scarlatti. He worked in the city of Ferrara in northern Italy, a hotbed of progressive influences, particularly in the fields of singing, instrumental performance and musical rhetoric. Frescobaldi was, therefore, ideally placed to absorb the influences of Flanders, Rome, Naples and nearby Venice and, influenced by advances in keyboard technology and performance techniques, developed his mastery of both organ and harpsichord. Volume 10 in the Brilliant Classics Frescobaldi Edition is focused particularly on the 1608 Il Primo libro delle Fantasie a Quattro, composed when Frescobaldi was organist at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. It is dedicated to Francesco Borghese, brother of Pope Paul V, a shrewd move by the composer, and was his first keyboard work to be published. Strongly contrapuntal in nature, these fantasias are musically complex, constructed using several melodic themes and contrasting sections. The fantasies on this recording are interspersed with seven canzonas.The remaining canzonas can be heard on CD2 among the Canzoni alla Francese. On this recording, Roberto Loreggian improvises briefly at the beginning of each canzona, following the custom of the time, using Frescobaldi’s own toccatas as models. The canzonas date from 1615-45, and demonstrate the composer’s style developing and maturing over this 30-year span, creating music of extraordinary imagination and technical inventiveness.

Girolamo Frescobaldi was born in Ferrara in 1583, and worked for the influential and wealthy Este family. Ferrara at this time had become the centre for the modern arts and the musical avant-garde. Virtuoso singing and playing flourished, and it was into this heady atmosphere that the young Frescobaldi cut his teeth.

In 1608 he took the position of organist at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. In 1615 a new basilica was built with two fine organs upon which Frescobaldi performed his famous improvisatory toccatas during ceremonial occasions. In Rome at this time he mingled with other major figures in the artistic community including Bernini and Pietro da Cortona.

Although Frescobaldi was one of the earliest composers to make keyboard compositions his speciality, he was also expected to provide vocal and choral works for his patron.

On the third volume of the Brilliant Classics Frescobaldi Edition are two Masses that have survived in manuscript partbooks, inscribed ‘G.F.di’, which scholars believe is a reference to Frescobaldi. It is likely that these masses were performed in the basilica, and Frescobaldi uses popular songs as the basis for both works. One is a song of a girl pleading with her mother not to send her to a convent, the other a song composed for the wedding of the Grand Duke of Tuscany in 1589. Both works are beautifully crafted examples of late 17th-century Italian church music

Recording dates from 2006, new release

Comprehensive booklet note with sung texts and translations

Other volumes in the Brilliant Classics Frescobaldi Edition: Canzone (93766) and Toccatas and Partitas (93767)

Born in the northern city of Ferrara in 1583, Girolamo Frescobaldi was one of the most significant figures in Italian keyboard music before Domenico Scarlatti. Under the patronage of the Este family, Ferrara had developed into a major centre for the arts, especially the musical avant-garde, and Frescobaldi thrived in this exciting artistic firmament.

In 1608 he was promoted to the post of organist at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Here he was required to play at all the major religious ceremonies, and to provide organ improvisations as interludes in the Mass.

The Fiori Musicali or ‘musical flowers’ occupy a special place among his works. Published in 1635, they consist of three ‘organ Masses’. Designed for churches where there was an organ, but no choir, the organ would play the movements of the Mass in the form of toccatas, canzonas, recercars and so on, sometimes with plainchant provided by the priest.

The music is relatively simple to play compared with Frescobaldi’s other works for organ. No doubt he was thinking of country organists who were endowed with more modest abilities as musicians. That said, they are deeply felt and sincere works.

New recording from 2008

Full booklet notes by Frescobaldi scholar Noel O’Regan

The Brilliant Classics Frescobaldi Edition is winning golden opinions across Europe, not least for the fact that this entrrprising project is being undertaken at all. And yet the richness of the music thereby revealed, volume by volume, is so compelling that one can only be astonished that it has not been attempted before. The edition is the brainchild of Roberto Loreggian, who features here in the varied and virtuosic Second Book of Toccatas, playing them on the harpsichord and organ each according to their individual temperament. The Second Book was composed 12 years after the first, in 1627, when Frescobaldi was at the height of his creative powers and indeed his prestige: he was organist at the then-largest church in the world, the Roman Basilica of St Peter. It is a more eclectic collection than the first. It has eleven toccatas to start but continues with an intabulated madrigal, some canzonas and some stylised dance music, four sets of variations and a set of liturgical items appropriate for Vespers.

It is these last pieces, especially, which mark out this volume as different. Reproducing the sort of music Frescobaldi played regularly in St. Peter’s or in other Roman institutions, it consists of sets of versets for alternative performance with a plainsong choir, of four hymns, and of Magnificats in three of the church tones or modes. The toccatas in Book Two seem even more assured than those in the earlier book, more structured but also more diverse, many of them including tripletime sections and more regular canzona-like segments.

Volume 6 of this path-breaking series, the first to record every extant work by Girolamo Frescobaldi, focuses on the secular madrigals. These works - he wrote one book, and evidently hoped to write more - are no less innovatory than the keyboard works that so impressed and influenced J.S. Bach. The texts feature the usual parade of lovelord shepherds and sighing maidens. Love unrequited is the keynote, but Frescobaldi's musical response to the expressive affekt is more charming than heart-rending: these are not the passionate and personal declarations of Monteverdi or Gesualdo.

These madrigals were Frescobaldi's first published music, and therefore evidently music of which he felt justifiably proud. Their language is doubtless shaped by his education and service in the northern Italian cities of Ferrara and Mantua, which thanks to the patronage of families such as the famous Gonzagas was a cosmopolitan hotbed of artistic and creative endeavour. Frescobaldi met and became friends with Peter Philips, the noted English composer of madrigals who had settled in the Netherlands, and Philips's delicacy of imagination can be heard in this collection. The nineteen madrigals with which Frescobaldi introduced himself have an admirable clarity of formal design that gives each line its due weight in terms of duration and emotion, and a transparent counterpoint that favours delicacy over density as a stylistic means, homophonic and polyphonic sections being cleverly alternated. It is pleasing to see the respect that Frescobaldi pays to the texts: the words are set to graceful melodic phrases, and never obscured by excessive counterpoint, but interpreted literally with immediate attention to meaning.

The Brilliant Classics Frescobaldi Edition is rapidly establishing itself as the most authoratative edition of the works of that bridge between the Italian Renaissance and Baroque, Girolamo Frescobaldi.

This CD features the complete secular arias for voices and various renaissance instruments such as theorbo, chitarra and viola da gamba.

Excellent performances on period instruments by the specialist group Modo Antiquo.

Earlier issues in this series received rave reviews in various international musical media.

Scholarly written linernotes and vocal texts included.

New recordings.

Brilliant is coming to the end of another ground-breaking series with this ninth volume of the first-ever recorded intégrale of the works of Girolamo Frescobaldi. Only two more volumes remain; all of them, of course, involving the sparkling musicianship and scholarly zeal of the keyboard player Roberto Loreggian.

Frescobaldi was born in Ferrara in 1583, and worked for the influential and wealthy Este family. Ferrara at this time had become the centre for the modern arts and the musical avant-garde. Virtuoso singing and playing flourished, and it was into this heady atmosphere that the young Frescobaldi cut his teeth. Frescobaldi was one of the earliest composers to make keyboard music his speciality, and he was the most important composer for the keyboard prior to Domenico Scarlatti.

These Capriccios were dedicated to Alfonso D’Este, Prince of Modena. They illustrate vividly the invention, and the improvisatory skills for which the composer was renowned. They contain solemn music as well as musical humour, imitations of birds (the cuckoo in particular), and are extremely well written musical exercises for students.

New recording made in 2009.

Booklet notes.

A new instalment in the prestigious Frescobaldi Edition of Brilliant Classics.

Frescobaldi was the greatest “inventor” of keyboard music before Bach, developing new techniques and instrumental novelties, a true virtuoso.

Roberto Loreggian is one of the foremost interpreters of Frescobaldi, having won the highest critical praise for his earlier recordings in this series.

Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) is the most significant figure in Italian keyboard music before Domenico Scarlatti. He was born in the northern city of Ferrara which, under the Este family had become a major centre for the musical avant-garde. Frescobaldi thrived in this heady environment, and this together with the influences he had picked up from his travels to Rome and Flanders gave his music its distinctive style. He became organist at St Peter’s in Rome, and when the new St Peter’s was completed in 1615 it was equipped with two superb organs which Frescobaldi performed on during official services and state events.

The ten Recercari on this CD were published in 1615.The word ‘recercare’ means to search, or tease out. Musically it describes a work in which a short abstract theme, or motif is manipulated through imitation, inversion and so on. In this recording each recercare is preceded by a toccata taken from a manuscript copied for the wealthy Fugger family of Augsberg. Whilst not from Frescobaldi’s 1615 set of Toccatas, they do show many of his fingerprints.

Frescobaldi’s keyboard music provides a link between the music of Palestrina and Victoria and that of J.S Bach.

Claudio Monteverdi and Girolamo Frescobaldi were two of the most influential musical figures in 17th-century Italy; while the former's boundary-pushing madrigals, operas and sacred works changed the course of Baroque vocal music irrevocably, the latter was one of the first – and most prominent – composers to devote serious attention to composing for the keyboard.

This new recording celebrates the influence that these two composers continue to exert over performers and audiences today -- and the fascination that their music inspires -- through a selection of motets and instrumental pieces, performed with precision and authority by Il Pegaso and Maurizio Croci. Of particular interest are a handful of new discoveries: three Marian antiphons by Monteverdi, preserved in a music print held at the Biblioteka Uniwersytecka in Wroclaw, Poland, and pieces drawn from a recently-unearthed notebook of Frescobaldi's, including early stages of extant works.

With the addition of several better known compositions, this intriguing collection illuminates some less familiar aspects of both composers' oeuvres, and places recent musicological discoveries within reach of listeners. In their debut recording, the new ensemble Il Pegaso, led by Maurizio Croci, deliver performances invested with passion and expertise.

Other information:

- A rare and exciting opportunity to hear recently-discovered pieces by Monteverdi and Frescobaldi, performed by experts in 17th-century Italian music.

- The debut recording by new ensemble Il Pegaso.

- Recorded in February 2012.