Alessandro Scarlatti wrote hundreds of cantatas for the soprano voice in the Baroque era. A small percentage use a string ensemble; some of those are featured on a new album by Francesca Aspromonte titled "Vieni, o Notte" (Come, oh Night) with the ensemble Arsenale Sonoro directed by Boris Begelman. KBACH's Michael Keelan talked with Aspromonte on First Take.
Transcript
Michael Keelan: This is KBACH’s First Take and I’m Michael Keelan. I’m talking with Francesca Aspromonte about her new album, Vieni, O Notte: Music of Alessandro Scarlatti. He’s a composer who most listeners will know from his Christmas Cantata, but this recording has serenades for voice of Scarlatti and also some instrumental music. Thanks for joining us today, Francesca. Can you tell us what the difference between a serenade and a regular cantata is?
Francesca Aspromonte: First of all, thank you for inviting me. So, a serenata is basically a cantata, there’s not much of a difference. The only difference in name, we could say that a serenata is something that happens at night. In Italian, serenata means, you know, when somebody sings with probably a guitar or something under the balcony and calls for the lady to come out. This is what serenata in nowadays Italian means. So, the fact that they’re placed at night is probably the reason why he called them serenata rather than normal cantata.
Michael Keelan: And Alessandro Scarlatti is a composer from the generation before the Baroque composers whom many listeners will know, like Vivaldi and Handel. You consider him special, as you describe in the program notes. Why is that?
Francesca Aspromonte: Well, I think he’s somebody who, yes, in fact, he comes before all those people that everybody knows, but his peculiarity is that whatever he composes, he’s got everything that came before him in his style, and he already has glimpses of what’s going to come in the future. Sometimes you don’t know if it’s Handel or Scarlatti, and we have to remember that Handel probably, if not just really started with him, but he must have seen his scores, he must have heard his music, because in his early compositions we can really find basically what Scarlatti was doing. So, he’s the father of Italian Baroque music, like eighteenth-century Baroque music.
Michael Keelan: I noticed that these pieces often have very short movements. So that’s one difference from Handel, you know, typically a Handel aria could be five or seven minutes, whereas many of the sections in these cantatas are only two minutes long and so it gives kind of a unified feel over the course of the cantata. Do you find that also?
Francesca Aspromonte: Yes, absolutely, especially two out of the three that are in this CD. And this is because it’s a much earlier style. It calls more for seventeenth century rather than what was coming afterwards. And plus, since it’s not an opera, you don’t have to feel so many minutes. We’re used to, you know, we go to the opera, we sit down in silence, but we have to remember that at the time people were, you know, doing basically everything they wanted in a theater. So they had to—the shows must have lasted like five, four, six hours. And a cantata, instead, is something that happens during a party, during a dinner, and it has to be shorter and it has to tell a story and the story has to function from beginning to end, so this is why sometimes we find that it’s much more fluent than an opera.
Michael Keelan: And you credit multiple figures on the album who are perhaps librarians or musicologists who helped you arrange this music. What part did they play?
Francesca Aspromonte: Well, mostly we begged for scores, because you know, it’s not that easy to find unknown pieces and sometimes, well, it’s their job, actually. We play, but they go into libraries and they breathe dust and they bring these scores alive. We are used to say that sometimes an unknown piece is taken from, you know, an attic or something. And this is what they do. And Rosalind Halton is a great scholar that studied Scarlatti her whole life and Daniela la Porta gave us a lot of scores, and in the end, there is this amazing Neapolitan musicologist who we contacted to know, you know, how was it in Naples at the time to know about orchestration and so on. So in the HIP movement, musicologists are needed to fill the voids because we are—we could say in a way we are carpenters, we are shoemakers, you know, we’re tailors. We make music and sometimes, especially when it comes to dig into libraries, this is what musicologists are for.
Michael Keelan: Right, you refer to Historically Informed Performance, the HIP movement. Did you get to hear these pieces in any way while learning them with the ensemble or did you essentially need to play them on the keyboard as you learned them? What was that process like?
Francesca Aspromonte: Well, we don’t usually listen to necessarily to other people’s recordings. The first thing we do is we look at the score, we put it on the harpsichord and just play it down to see what it sounds like. Of course, with the experience we have, we’re also able just looking at the score, we’re able to say, “Oh, this is really interesting. Hmm, this must be beautiful,” but in the end we need to put it on the instrument and play it once to have an idea.
Michael Keelan: How much is left to the performer beyond what’s on the page? Is there more for you to do in ornamentation or in decision-making than with later Baroque composers?
Francesca Aspromonte: Well, absolutely yes. Well, I would say up until, I don’t know, the generation of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, for instance, there is a lot that it’s left to—well, at the time it was common sense. Now we call it historically informed performance, but at the time it was, you know, it was a waste of ink and of time and strength to put down dynamics, to put down ornaments when everybody knew exactly what they had to do, because at the time it was common knowledge. I would say within the rules of that time period, of that—also the land where the piece was composed and so on, we have relatively a lot of freedom. Not comparable—sometimes people like to compare Baroque music to jazz—no, that’s not the case. But what makes an interpretation of this repertoire different from the other is that every performer can really, in the da capo section, so in the repetition, can really bring their own taste, their own feeling, and no variation is equal to the other if you, you know, if you’re a little bit—if you have experience with making variations.
Michael Keelan: If you think of all the hundreds of cantatas that Scarlatti wrote, not that high of a percentage of them use a string ensemble like these. What is the typical role of the string ensemble within these cantatas? Does it change from one piece to the next or one section to the next?
Francesca Aspromonte: Well, that really depends when he composed. If I look at the CD, for instance, there are three cantatas and all three of them are for two violins, soprano, and basso continuo. If I look at the second one, which is from, I would say, the very end of the seventeenth century, the instruments play a very vocal part. If I were to put words underneath, I could have an ensemble sing it because it’s written in a very madrigalistic way. Whilst in the last cantata, L'orche più stanco al sol, very seventeenth-century like, the instruments come in in the refrains at the beginning and at the end, they don’t necessarily play with me all the time. And instead, the one that contains the title of the album, Notte ch'in carro d'ombre, it’s a very pure Baroque piece in which the instruments play all the time, there is even a recitativo accompagnato. So the instrument is in continuous dialogue with the singer. It’s much more modern, for instance, than the other two.
Michael Keelan: So what you’re saying is even though these manuscripts don’t necessarily have dates on them, you can tell approximately when they were written because his style changed so much over time.
Francesca Aspromonte: Yes, this is one factor and plus, they—I don’t think that any of those is—how you say when the composer wrote—it’s a manuscript, but it’s a copy. None of those are Scarlatti’s handwriting. They’re all copies, and the copies are in folders with other cantatas, sometimes by other composers, and they are dated either by hand or we can say, “This paper belongs to a folder that was found here and so that should be, let’s say, beginning of this decade of the century and so on.” But of course, we can also tell by the fact—by how the music is composed.
Michael Keelan: You alluded to this a moment ago, but do you feel like Scarlatti was fundamentally a vocal composer in the way that he wrote for instruments or vice versa or a little bit of both?
Francesca Aspromonte: Bah! Hmm, well, if you ask a singer, of course a singer will answer he was absolutely a vocal composer. Plus, if you really look at his production, you will see he wrote six hundred cantatas for voice and instruments, yes, of course, but mainly he wrote operas, he wrote oratorio, he wrote some incredible sacred music, so he was mainly a vocal composer. With that said, his knowledge and the way he writes harmonies makes you understand that he was a complete composer. If you look at the same generation, for instance, Arcangelo Corelli, who was the composer for violin of that century before Vivaldi came along, he didn’t write anything for voice at all, at least that we know of. They were specialized, these composers. And if, for instance, if Scarlatti forgot to write a sinfonia, an overture for some of his works, he would go to Corelli, would go to Lully, would go to another composer and say, “Can I borrow or can you please write something for this oratorio for me?”
Michael Keelan: Of course, the cantatas are wonderful and expressive, but I was also very pleasantly surprised by the instrumental pieces, the sonatas, that are almost like pre-string quartets that were very inventive. Can you talk a little bit about the ensemble, Arsenale Sonoro?
Francesca Aspromonte: Yes, well, here I feel a little bit ashamed because of course I don’t belong in there in the choice that Maestro Begelman made about the quartets. They were regarded as the first examples of string quartets for sure, because it’s written senza cembalo, so without harpsichord, and in some copies also altavolino, which refers to an ancient practice, let’s say at even the sixteenth century, of being around a table either singing or playing, but normally singing like madrigals without accompaniment. So that was the reason why Begelman chose to do it without any basso continuo at all. And they are incredible soloists, each and every one of them. They have this capability of playing so soft that it’s almost nothing and so loud that even if it’s just five of them, they sound like an orchestra.
Michael Keelan: With these pieces being sometimes difficult to access, these cantatas, what would need to happen to make it easier for singers to program them and perform them?
Francesca Aspromonte: Ah, that’s a really good question. Well, right now the historically informed performance practice movement is much more spread than it was some years ago, so we are—the new generations already know that they will have to research a bit if they want to find something that’s less performed, let’s say. But we came across an edition of these pieces, for instance, before making our own edition with the manuscripts. We found a modern printed version of many serenatas, and we went across them and we said, “Hmm, this could be interesting, this one could be interesting as well.” And another way, it’s recordings actually. It’s a good way to spread the message and to have young ensembles and young singers and players be interested in such an amazing composer.
Michael Keelan: This is a very vivid album, Vieni, O Notte: Come, O Night. Francesca Aspromonte, thanks very much for talking with us on First Take today.
Francesca Aspromonte: Thank you, it was a pleasure.