As the theme of this year's IIB Bank Music in Great Irish Houses festival is strongly Latin, the Irish debut of the exciting, energetic Italian early music ensemble, Europa Galante, at Castletown House on June 11th, should prove a festival highlight.
Formed by the Palermo-born violinist Fabio Biondi in 1990, Europa Galante set out with the aim of alerting the international music public to "a new and definitive Italian presence" interpreting baroque works on period instruments. The ensemble has already achieved this through their warm, rich sound and a busy international performance schedule, as well as their high-profile collaboration with the Ente Santa Cecilia in Rome in reviving 18th century Italian operas and oratorios. There is also their impressive and already extensive discography.
Their 1990 debut CD, a recording of Vivaldi's Concerti on the French independent label, Opus 111, amassed a number of awards. Subsequent recordings for Virgin Classics, which signed them in 1998, include Vivaldi's L'estro armonico, 12 concertos Opus 3 (1998), as well as Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (2003), while their recording of Vivaldi's Mandolin Concertos, including concerti con molti strumenti, was nominated for a 2004 Grammy award. The recently released recording of Vivaldi's opera, Bajazet, was "editor's choice" in last April's issue of Gramophone.
Another Italian master recorded by the ensemble is the great Luigi Boccherini. Their 2001 lively rendition of Boccherini's String Quintets was followed in 2003 by the Guitar Quintets, performed by two violins, viola, cello, guitar and castanets. Europa Galante recorded a superlative volume of arias from cantatas by Bach with English tenor Ian Bostridge in 2001. Their 1995 version of Locatelli's Concerti Grossi won the Prix du Disque in France.
Other recordings include Italian violin sonatas by Veracini, Locatelli, Mascitti and Tartini. Their recording of Scarlatti's oratorio, La Santissima Trinitá, was released by Virgin in 2004; the ensemble had previously recorded two other Scarlatti oratorios, Maddalena (1993) and Humanita e Lucifero, two years later on the Opus 111 label.
Europa Galante's repertoire, spanning the music of three centuries, ranges from the oratorios of Scarlatti, to the operas of Handel and Vivaldi, string sonatas of 17th century Italian composers such as Castello, Legrenzi and Farina; and on to the defining instrumental works of the 18th century by Scarlatti, Corelli and Handel.
Their festival programme reflects this balance of the universal and the minor; the familiar with the lesser known. Corelli's Concerto Grosso Op 6 No 4 is an outstanding example of the idiom which was the most important type of concerto composed in the baroque period. Far less familiar is the Sonata quindicesima due violini, viola e basso by Dario Castello, the early 17th century Venetian composer and wind player. In 1992, Europa Galante recorded a Castello work, Sonate Concertate, for two violins, viola, cello, harpsichord and the now rarely played, lute-like théorbe, or theorbo.
The Milanese Giovanni-Battista Sammartini (1698-1775), a pioneer of the sonata and a teacher of Gluck, wrote 2,000 works in all genres, of which Sinfonia for strings in F, JC. 36, is among the best known, even then if not all that widely. It will feature in the Europa Galante recital, along with the Concerto in A major b Op 7 No 4 by an earlier composer, the Naplese, Michel Mascitti (1663/4-1760), a long-lived cosmopolitan musician who travelled widely through Italy, Germany and the Netherlands, before settling in Paris where his oeuvre of some 116 works was published.
He was regarded as the central figure of Italian instrumental music in France and considered an equal of Corelli, only 10 years his senior yet who was to die some 47 years before him. Mascitti, whose work is similar to that of Corelli, is believed to have spent his final two decades in retirement.
Corelli's influence may also be seen on the work of Francois Couperin, probably the most important of the early 18th century French composers. His L'Apothéose de Corelli grande sonate en trio testifies to this. It also consolidates the balance of Italian and French music in the ensemble's intriguing festival programme while the inclusion of Purcell's Ciaccona in G minor Z.730 is a fascinating choice. The English composer, who died at 36, was a gifted original blessed with a richly European baroque sound, as evident from this piece, which is well suited to the Europa Galante's engaging musicality.
