Giovanni Rovetta was Claudio Monteverdi's successor at St. Mark's cathedral in Venice, a fact that by itself should have accorded him more attention than he has received from performers up to this 2001 West German Radio recording by the
Cantus Cölln, reissued in an attractive budget-priced release by Harmonia Mundi in its Musique d'abord series. The style of these sacred pieces is that of Monteverdi, and, equally of St. Mark's, with divided choruses, soloists, and instrumentalists resounding from various corners of the performance space. The music was apparently performed, however, not in St. Mark's but in a nearby St. George's church (apparently San Giorgio Maggiore, on the island of the same name). It was commissioned by the French ambassador to Venice for a celebration of the birth of Louis XIV in 1638 -- an event to celebrate in a mercantile city like Venice, for it signaled a potential return to stability after the depredations of the Thirty Years' War. The program is a loose evocation of what a Vespers service used in such as celebration might have sounded like -- it does not claim to be an exact reconstruction. The program includes a series of psalms Rovetta composed around this time, a Magnificat, a group of motets with no choir or orchestra, and some instrumental pieces by Giovanni Battista Buonamente. Rovetta was not a clone of Monteverdi, and this disc is strongly recommended to anyone with an interest in the evolution of Italian style in the seventeeth century; it does not represent the tail end of the Gabrieli/Monteverdi axis but betrays modern traits. Sample the six-part Lauda Jerusalem, track 8, in which Rovetta forgoes big polychoral effects in favor of a clear, ritonrello-like structure and sharply rhythmic tunes. Throughout, Rovetta's harmonies are simpler than Monteverdi's; there is little of the drama of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610 here. Partly that's a result of director
Konrad Junghänel's sumptuous but slightly dry interpretations; for all the stress annotator Linda Maria Koldau places on the importance of affect in music of this period, one might have expected to hear a little more of it here, especially in view of the intensity
Junghänel's ensemble has brought to German music from later in the century. He may, however, have thought that the ceremonial use to which the music was put called for a more restrained style, and there is nothing to stop the listener from getting a pretty good idea of what this slice of continuing Venetian splendor is all about. The sound engineering, employing St. Osdag's church in Neustadt-Mandelsloh, Saxony, is top notch. Texts are in Latin, French, German, and English.