Paolo Quagliati was, like
Girolamo Frescobaldi, a transitional figure in Italian music whose works span from the last bloom of the Renaissance to the early strivings of the Baroque. Unlike
Frescobaldi, to whom keyboard music is the main course, Quagliati's surviving music is small in quantity and his keyboard music makes up the smallest part of it. Tactus' Paolo Quagliati: Toccata, Ricercari e Canzoni, featuring
Aaron Edward Carpenè on organ and harpsichord, contains all of the keyboard music Quagliati is known to have produced -- a single Toccata on the eighth tone, published in 1593, and the 1601 print Ricercate e canzoni per sonare et cantare. This second publication contains 19 pieces that do not carry any indication of which ones are supposed to be ricercare and what others are canzone.
Carpenè, also the annotator of this Tactus disc, states that it's "pointless to specify which of these compositions correspond to (these) forms." Hmm, it seems with a little effort one could try; is there an authority in the house?
To his credit,
Carpenè varies these short movements through playing them on a fabulous restored seventeenth century organ, originally built by Luca Neri and situated in the Oratorio di Sant'Antonio da Padova in Rio Saliceto, Italy, while alternating others with a clavichord of modern build. In theory, this should keep the program from getting too monotonous, but Quagliati's music doesn't hold up its end of the bargain. He was renowned as an organist in Rome, but Quagliati's interest was centered in vocal music of a rather specific kind. No one was happier than he to witness the rise of the monody that heralded the beginning of the Baroque, and although he is not known to have written opera (his madrigal comedy Il carro di Fedeltà d'Amore comes close) even Quagliati's madrigals make only sparing use of complex counterpoint. The crashing dissonances and snaky chromatics known from the music of
Frescobaldi are not entirely absent from Quagliati, but they may as well be -- this music is as plain as the Roman nose on
Frescobaldi's face.
Carpenè does manage to bring off some of the music with a sense of panache, particularly the concluding measures of "No. VIII," but at other times he seems to be stumbling, and one wonders what is up with the lack of ornamentation in the last bars of the Toccata. Tactus' Paolo Quagliati: Toccata, Ricercari e Canzoni falls short of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear, and while
Carpenè is a good player, it would be nice to hear him in a program of music that is more substantial.