A graduate of the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, core member of the Solazzo Ensemble and artistic director of Il Dolce Conforto, Franziska Fleischanderl completed a PhD dissertation (Universiteit Leiden, 2001) on the history, repertoire and playing techniques of the eighteenth-century Italian salterio – an instrument akin to a fusion of medieval hand-held psaltery and renaissance hammered dulcimer laid flat in front of the player. This expertise has informed her previous two albums of Italian repertoire for solo voice, salterio and basso continuo. Sacred Salterio (Christophorus, 2016) offered three charming lamentations for Holy Week, written around the 1760s–1770s, found in Puglia among the repertoire of the Benedictine nun Alba Maria Santelli (and sung by soprano Miriam Feusinger). Salterio Italiano (Christophorus, 2018) juxtaposed samples of Venetian, Bolognese, Roman and Neapolitan sonatas and motets (with mezzo soprano Romina Basso). Fleischanderl’s third instalment is devoted to Vivaldi and takes its initial cue from the earliest-known eighteenth-century Italian solo part written for her instrument.

Vivaldi’s Giustino, first produced at Rome’s Teatro Capranica during the 1724 carnival, has a prominent showpiece at the close of Act 2 for the title-hero in partnership with an obbligato salterio (‘Ho nel petto un cor sì forte’, Scene 13). The theatre was bankrolled by the Borghese family, the printed libretto was dedicated to the niece of Pope Innocent XIII and the long aria was performed by papal castrato Paolo Mariani, perhaps with the instrumentalist Florido Ubaldi, who had been playing the salterio actively in Rome since 1720 (numerous modern recordings usually last between six and seven minutes). Reinhard Strohm noted that a salterio was also used during the same Roman carnival season in Vinci’s Farnace at the rival Teatro Alibert (The Operas of Antonio Vivaldi, two volumes, volume 1 (Florence: Olschki, 2008), 345). Surprisingly, Vivaldi’s only extant composition featuring salterio is not included in full here, but it is used as the basis of a much-shortened solo instrumental ‘fantasia’ that closes the album. Admittedly, the Red Priest’s Roman aria has been recorded several times before, not only as part of three more-or-less complete interpretations of Giustino, but also for recitals including Cecilia Bartoli’s album of Vivaldi opera arias with Il Giardino Armonico (Decca 466 569–2DH, 1999). Perhaps these factors explain why Fleischanderl and her small band (two violins, viola, cello, violone, theorbo/guitar and harpsichord/organ) eschew the Roman connection and opt instead for entirely instrumental music-making that focuses conceptually on Venice’s Ospedale della Pietà – although nothing by Vivaldi for the figlie di coro containing psaltery has survived (if any such works ever existed).

The gap is filled by adjusting the instrumentation of a selection of concertos and sonatas so that Fleischanderl can cultivate a variety of sonorities and techniques on her historical salterio made by Roman luthier Michele Barbi in 1725 (not long after Giustino had been premiered in the eternal city). Co-conspirator Olivier Fourés provides musicological assistance in the choices of repertoire and takes his cue from Charles de Brosses’s praise of the ‘transcendent music’ he heard at the four Venetian ospedali in 1739 that prompted the French eyewitness’s description that

Fourés’s booklet essay points out that talented women at the Pietà were encouraged to play many sorts of unusual stringed instruments (violini in tromba, violas ‘all’inglese’, violas d’amore, several kinds of mandolins and harps), trombones and other brass instruments, diverse woodwinds including chalumeaux, three-manual harpsichords, organ and so forth. Not long after Vivaldi began teaching at the Pietà, its governors approved the purchase of new salterios in 1706 and 1709, so he must have encountered the instrument in use there at least from time to time. The salterio had fallen from the curriculum by December 1759, when Fulgenzio Perotti was contracted by the Pietà specifically to revive its use; a few manuscripts of Perotti’s salterio concertos have the name of his pupil Giosepha/Josepha inscribed (the Pietà’s music archive is in the Biblioteca del Conservatorio di Musica Benedetto Marcello).

Fourés acknowledges that Vivaldi ‘often changed the instrumentation of his compositions himself: the oboe turned into a bassoon, the cello into a flute, the organ into a violin or lute, etc.’ (15). Accordingly, Fourés and Fleischanderl have taken inspiration from the composer’s own methods to adapt a few pieces that they believe are well suited to the incorporation of salterio either as solo or as continuo instrument. The mingled scholarly awareness and creative liberties are explained lucidly in Fleischanderl’s own note on ‘The Salterio as a Concerto Instrument’. She observes that concertos featuring salterio soloists were performed at musical gatherings in Venice, Bologna (the Accademia de’ Filarmonici), Milan, Pavia (the Accademia Filarmonica Fortini), Spoleto (encouraged by the noblewoman Antonia Travaglini), Siena, Rome and Naples, and she mentions that fourteen of these original Italian concertos are extant (one hopes that some of these will be featured in a future album). Fleischanderl remarks that ‘in early eighteenth-century Italy, it wasn’t unusual to play violin music on the salterio’, and she claims that the choice of pieces was guided by the desire ‘to find concerti that were suitable for the salterio in terms of key and writing style, as well as concerti that might sound even better and lighter on the salterio than on the violin . . . My central question was always: which concerto benefits from the salterio and which one loses?’ (17). Inevitably, there is a strong dose of subjective conjecture and partisanship at work here.

Nevertheless, a judicious variety of historical playing techniques is applied to suit the moods and colours sought throughout the programme. Fleischanderl uses wooden hammers (battute) in most of the quick music demanding virtuosity, changes to leather battute on four occasions and uses plectra pizzicato just once (the plectra mounted in metal rings worn around the fingers), but for most of the time she plucks pizzicato with her fingers to produce clearer resonance – especially in slower movements. The contrast between the zesty pinpoint precision of wooden battute in the outer movements of the Concerto in C major (rv186, a violin concerto preserved in Turin) and lulling sweetness of finger-plucking in the central Largo is enthralling – never mind if these are sounds that Vivaldi actually knew or might have encouraged, every textural element and gesture in the music-making is delineated charismatically. Moreover, Markus Heiland’s superb sound-engineering and mixing skills yield a bigger and richer sound from the collective forces than one might expect.

A similar change of techniques – swapping over from wooden to leather battute in a cantabile Adagio – has a vivid impact in a Concerto in E minor (rv275), which survives in an arrangement for flute supplanting violin (perhaps by Christoph Graupner in Darmstadt), and also an organ transcription in the hand of Johann Gottfried Walther. rv275 and another violin concerto in D major (rv220) featured here were both printed originally in Concerti a Cinque (Amsterdam, 1717), and are not yet among Vivaldi’s widely known pieces. Readers may be entertained by a promotional video of Fleischanderl miming the solo part of the final Allegro of rv220 on her 1725 salterio, filmed on the island of San Giorgio Maggiore, just next to the Instituto Antonio Vivaldi’s headquarters and with the Piazza San Marco in the background (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_xZJtj27EA).

An Andante lifted from an alternative version of Op. 7 No. 4 (a concerto in F major, rv294a), apparently never recorded before, has beguiling intimacy from the softly plucking duo of Fleischanderl and theorbist Nacho Laguna. In contrast, a chamber Concerto in D major for recorder, violin and continuo (rv84, preserved in Dresden) transfers the solo wind part to salterio, and its conversational exchanges are delivered eloquently by violinist Elena Abbati and Fleischanderl. Also preserved in the Sächsische Landesbibliothek and reckoned to be among Vivaldi’s earliest-known compositions, the Sonata in G major (rv820) is realized essentially as an elaborate concertante trio for salterio (replacing violin), cello (Carla Rovirosa, despatching solo passages with élan, especially in the Adagios) and organ (played brightly by Deniel Perer). The salterio takes a back seat at the epicentre of the album for the rest of the band’s stylish and articulate performance of the Concerto in G minor for strings and basso continuo (rv156). Thereafter, it returns to centre stage in an Adagio from an anonymous Venetian sonata in E minor, and discourses charmingly in a composite Sonata in B minor pieced together using an Allegro from rv35a, an Allemande from Op. 5 No. 4 (rv35) and an Allegro (rv37a) – the latter a new discovery by Fourés that is played with tangy brilliance thanks to Fleischanderl’s one-off application of plectra (its texture prompting Laguna to switch from theorbo to light strumming guitar). The Concerto in B minor (rv388) has astonishing virtuoso extroversion and dynamism from the salterio (adopting the solo violin part), although, as often throughout the album, the standout moment is the central Largo in which the softer lyricism of the finger piccicato method is supported by subtly pulsing strings. Since these recording sessions in Baden-Württemberg in October and November 2022, Fleischanderl and countertenor Carlo Vistoli have collaborated in Andrea Marcon and La Cetra’s concert performance of Vivaldi’s Giustino at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw given on 4 February 2023, and her PhD dissertation, currently under embargo, is going to be published as a book.