Francesco Antonio Bonporti (1672-1749), an amateur composer from Trento, was one of the unconventional Italians of the period, those whose music had a freer, more performative dimension than that of supposedly more "absolute" composers like Bach. The rediscovery of Baroque performance techniques has raised the stock of Bonporti and of composers like touring violinist Francesco Veracini, who admired him and played his music. Bonporti, in fact, even comes with an endorsement from Bach himself, who copied out some of his compositions as he did with those of Vivaldi. Bonporti has never received the attention Vivaldi did, partly because his output is slender in comparison -- 12 published sets, but just a few manuscript works in addition to that. His music is lively and distinctive, even if one can't see quite what justifies the complete recorded edition being issued by the Dynamic label; single discs that intelligently programmed Bonporti's works in conjunction with other music of the period might have better served the composer's cause. Nevertheless, the music is worth closer acquaintance; contemporary with Corelli and Albinoni, it sounds little like either. These are essentially trio sonatas with a fixed continuo of violone (here a cello) and harpsichord, composed during the period when the distinction between the abstract three-movement "church" sonata (the sonata da chiesa, by no means exclusively ecclesiastical) and the multi-movement "chamber" sonata or sonata da camara, a set of dances, was at its height. Bonporti plays with the tension between the two, restricting the number of movements to four (in most of the Op. 4 set on disc one) or even three (in the Op. 6 set on disc two), and apparently titling the movements both with dance names and abstract tempo indications. The movements are short, like those of Albinoni, but Bonporti's textures are more variegated and full of surprises. Bonporti himself described his Invenzioni, Op. 10 (the term "inventions," too, may have been adopted by Bach, and the full story of Bach's encounter with Italian music has not yet been told) as "compositions of a peculiar conception and taste." They are not radical or especially adventurous harmonically, but they have an attractive combination of density and a certain brisk roughness. Sample the imitative but constantly changing Allemanda of the Sonata in A major, Op. 6/4, for a taste, and keep listening to hear the unusual cadences in the following Corrente movement. The playing of the four-member
Accademia i Filarmonici under the leadership of violinist
Alberto Martini is...one doesn't want to say dry, but it emphasizes the roughness, and the hard-edged, percussive quality of the Baroque violin is exploited to the maximum. It fits Bonporti's music well, but give it a listen if you haven't heard much hardcore Baroque violin before. The exhaustive nature of Dynamic's set of discs suits it more to libraries than to individual listeners, but buyers of whatever affiliation will not be disappointed either with this little-known repertory or with the performances.