Born one year shy of Taruskin's so-called ‘Class of 1685’, Francesco Durante nevertheless shares an interesting trait with two of the famous ‘graduates’ of that year, Bach and Scarlatti. All three appear to have preferred – or been constrained – to compose in genres other than opera. Durante achieved international recognition in his lifetime not through the staging of operatic productions, like his compatriots Porpora, Vinci and Leo, but rather through the dissemination, performance and publication of his sacred music and his finely crafted chamber music. Such a career was not entirely unusual for Roman musicians born in the 1680s, for example, but it was certainly odd for a Neapolitan.
Durante was, moreover, highly regarded as one of the greatest instructors of the age, and all of his students excelled in opera. Burney relates how ‘among his disciples he had the honour to number Pergolesi, Terradellas, Piccini, Sacchini, Traetta, Guglielmi, and Paisiello’ (Charles Burney, A General History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period (London: author, 1776–1789), volume 3, 536; the remaining quotations in this paragraph are from the same source). Burney's last words in his biographical entry on Durante emphasize the posthumous reputation that surrounded the composer in the 1770s: he was one of the greatest contrapuntists of his age, and the ‘greatest harmonist’; ‘his masses and motets are still in use, and models of correct writing’. Burney, never a great lover of intricate counterpoint, nevertheless found that in Durante ‘the most select, beautiful, and impassioned traits of melody … are put together with such science, that it seems as if the art and refinement in this species of composition could go no further’. As is often the case in A General History, Burney places his more sensuous and less scientific observations in a footnote. He recounts how Sacchini, after teaching some duets of Durante to his pupils, ‘seldom finished his lesson without kissing the book’. And Burney was lucky enough to have heard Durante's music performed ‘in select company’ by some of the greatest singers of his day. Good performance, something Burney had precious little of in his examinations of older music, ‘affords to lovers of such refined and artificial composition, a pleasure the most exquisite which [only] vocal Music can bestow’.
Kölner Akademie's 2011 compilation of Durante's sacred music is a welcome addition to a fairly solid discography dating back to the early 1990s. Concerto Köln (Capriccio C71074, 1992) and Il Giardino Armonico (Teldec 4509–93157–2, 1994) gave us spiky, vivid, even aggressive readings of the instrumental works that exhibited the newly energized, rhythmic and more spontaneous approach that characterized German and Italian string playing in historically informed performance practice at that time. For the ‘refined and artificial’ sacred genres of which Burney speaks – which are quite different from the muscular and quirky extroversion of Durante's concertos or his keyboard toccatas and sonatas – we have had to wait longer for better recordings that do more than simply scratch the surface of Durante in unappealing anthologies on instruments with modern set-ups, for example, where his works are often tucked away amongst others. A stand-out exception was the Freiburg Barockorchester's 1997 rendition of one of Durante's most famed works, once ascribed to Pergolesi: the Magnificat in B flat major (Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 77369, 1997).
Entitled Neapolitan Christmas, this cpo release provides an appealing selection of Durante's sacred music, beautifully performed and recorded, with two works out of the five (a motet and a mass) originally designed for Christmastime celebration. Conductor Michael Alexander Willens certainly knows his Durante: four out of the five works are freshly edited by him from manuscripts in European libraries. Unfortunately, the liner notes to the disc erroneously give the impression that Willens has done more than edit the works: ‘bearbeitet von’ is poorly translated as ‘arranged by’ in the liner notes and on the online Gracenote Media Database (which supplies data to many of the most popular music download services). Furthermore, Durante scholars might have appreciated knowing the locations of the manuscripts and parts that Willens and Nicola Heine (who edited the Magnificat in C minor) consulted for the scores used in this recording. But these are minor quibbles for a superb release that really shows off the best of Durante's exquisite craftsmanship in the genre in which he excelled. Here is a composer who – like Telemann – really kept up with the latest styles as his career progressed. It is no coincidence that the most galant, tuneful and theatrical works in this compilation are those specifically designated ‘per la nativitate Jesu Christe’ and ‘in Pastorale’. Here are all the joyful depictions of the nativity with its attendant proliferation of – mostly – rustic topics and tropes; there are shepherds with their droning zampogni (bagpipes) and hooting pifferi (oboes), but there are also the lullabies for the sleeping babe and laudatory exultations surrounding the birth itself.
The opening work, Ad presepe venite, is described as a ‘Pastorale o Mottetto’ and is the most lusciously scored of all the works in the compilation, with a pair of horns and oboes joining the strings and vocalists in the opening chorus (throughout singing one to a part). Immediately we have here all the hallmarks of the pastorale idiom; tuneful and conjunct motion in thirds and sixths, lilting siciliano rhythms and drone basses that bring to mind the zampogni of the shepherds. The following aria is in Durante's most winning modern style and belies the fact that he eschewed opera composition. The final minor-key duet for alto and tenor is a hushed lullaby tinged throughout with haunting chromaticism and sinuous turns of phrase.
The other Christmastime work on the disc is an A major mass that is labelled by Durante in typical Neapolitan fashion as a ‘Gloria à 4’, emphasizing the importance Neapolitan composers placed upon the Gloria. The opening Kyrie evokes the squealing, slippery sounds of the pifferi and zampogni with sudden shifts from a smooth cantabile pastorale idiom through leaping octave hiccups to slithering chromatic passages that are surely meant to depict rustic portamenti. All three elements (the drone with melody, the leaping octaves and sliding chromatic touches) are almost universal in Italian pastorale-themed music of the period, and are most familiar to today's audiences through exposure to the final movement of Vivaldi's La primavera (rv269). Leaping octaves and exultant trills characterize the appealing Gloria; once again Durante's fine control and unusually equal attention to contrast as well as unity come to the fore. The flighty upper strings of the attractive Gratias might be seen to evoke the angels that announce Christ's birth, and the Domine Deus demonstrates a Durante once more in full control of the modern style. These more dramatic styles are put aside for a touching return to a calmer pastorale idiom for the Qui Tollis and closing Cum Sancto (a brief virtuosic intervention for the bass soloist is Durante's setting of the Quonium). This is truly a beautiful example of this kind of eighteenth-century mass setting.
Of particular interest is Willens's new edition and subsequent reading of a previously unfamiliar four-part version of Durante's famous five-part Magnificat in B flat major, which garnered praise from contrapuntal connoisseurs well into the nineteenth century. Kölner Akademie's recording here makes for a fascinating and worthy comparison to Freiburg Barockorchester's fine 1997 rendition of the five-part version. Here is Durante in the stile antico and at his most ‘scientific’, to borrow Burney's description. The four-part version is dated 1746 and has only organ accompaniment (the earlier five-part version has orchestral accompaniment). The result is a more transparent and weightless setting of the Magnificat wherein Durante's contrapuntal procedures are rendered more apparent to the listener. The opening, for example, is built around the eponymous psalm tone which moves from voice to voice with the others spinning around it in graceful countermelodies. Traditionally more dramatic sections of the Magnificat are rendered in contrasting homophony and the psalm tone returns in the final Gloria.
Also included in this compilation is a late work, a Litany in F minor, coloured – as one might expect in that key – in rather severe and dark-coloured hues. Of real interest here is the sensitive (and occasionally luscious) setting of the text for the four vocalists, with expert and full accompaniment for the string orchestra. The Kölner Akademie also record a short, but no less expertly crafted, through-composed Magnificat for four voices and continuo. Overall, the soloists and orchestra are first rate. Willens guides the vocalists and orchestra through a nuanced, expressive and flexible reading that does real justice to the composer. Occasionally one might wish to hear more made of the expressive markings Durante notates: ‘sotto voce’, for example, and the various degrees of dolce that Italians often used to nuance piano markings.
Above all, it is overwhelmingly apparent from the works and fine performances on this recording that Durante had achieved an astounding mastery in the art of counterpoint. It is also a kind of craftsmanship that stands – refreshingly so – in contrast to that of another master of counterpoint, whose style is now pretty much universally regarded, for better or worse, as the touchstone for this kind of composition. One certainly hopes for more recorded examples and publications of Durante's sacred works, if only to broaden our awareness of the period beyond the dominant figure of J. S. Bach. After listening with delight to the works in this compilation, with their adroit, expressive and thoughtful conjoining of styles, topics and references, I can understand well why Sacchini would kiss with delight a score that contained such variety and imagination.
