Giovanni Battista Columbro - Lodovico da Viadana: Officium defunctorum & Missa pro defunctis (2012)

Lodovico da Viadana is a name known more to music history students than to concertgoers. There was no point at which Baroque music magically began, nor even the basso continuo that was integral to it: people scribbled numbers under bass lines as a mnemonic aid for several years before Viadana came along. But in 1602 Viadana published a collection of concertos, vocal works, that bore the explicit designation con il basso continuo, and that was a key milestone in the development of the harmonic conception of music as it is known today to anyone who sits down with a guitar. Everything Viadana did was done better by Claudio Monteverdi just a few years later, but the neglect of his music on recordings has still been disappointing, a situation that a group of musicians in Gualtieri, Viadana's burial place, has been trying to remedy with this and a series of other recordings. The group refers to the composer as Lodovico; the town of Viadana, near Mantua in northern Italy, was his birthplace. The performances here are simple, with a small ensemble of singers, strings, and brass. The music consists of a Missa pro defunctis -- a requiem mass -- and offices for the Mass of the Dead. Those who have heard Viadana's sacred concertos will be intrigued to find that this music, though less soloistic and somewhat more contrapuntal, is basically in the same style; the mass form did not call forth a more conservative manner from the composer. Viadana's music was widely distributed through publications and influenced not only Italian composers but also German sacred music of the seventeenth century, and it is easy to hear in the sober tone of the Missa pro defunctis what Schütz, to name one, heard in Viadana. The requiem contains the most attractive music on the disc; sample the substantial Dies irae, track 7, to appreciate the unique effect of the alternation of chant and compact, almost chordal responses, which must have sounded shocking when first performed, in Viadana's music. The contemporary artwork on the cover adds something to the presentation, and the sound quality, benefiting from the environment of an entirely appropriate Mantuan church apparently named for a different Viadana, is above average for the small Tactus label. Texts are in Latin only. This is a worthwhile disc for library collections and serious lovers of the early Baroque. ~ James Manheim