Maurizio Croci - Frescobaldi: Fiori Musicali (2011)

Girolamo Frescobaldi's Fiori Musicali (Musical Flowers) of 1635 was an immensely influential collection of contrapuntal organ pieces that was admired by Bach, whose Art of the Fugue may have been inspired by it. The collection has retained a certain amount of pedagogical use down to the present day. Yet the collection, consisting of a large number of short but very dense pieces of polyphony, doesn't yield its secrets easily. Most Baroque keyboard collections, which were intended more as publications or compilations than as performing scores, fare better excerpted than presented whole, but in this case hearing the entire set, as you do in this fine performance by Maurizio Croci, is more enlightening. Like The Art of the Fugue, the Fiori Musicali make up not only a compendium of techniques but also an ordered sequence, and the interaction between the two functions is part of its greatness. The Fiori Musicali consist of three sets of organ pieces for the celebration of mass at a major Roman church (it's not known which one). The role of the organ was specified by church regulations, but the individual realizations by Frescobaldi are brilliant. The music for each mass consists of an introductory toccata, a Kyrie setting where the organ contributes tiny versets in alteration with sung chant, and a variety of contrapuntal and quasi-improvisatory pieces for various junctures in the mass after that, with special emphasis laid on a so-called Elevation Toccata, a mystical, chromatically murky piece marking the elevation or lifting of the consecrated bread and wine during the mass. Hearing the whole set brings home the imagination of the individual pieces, for example the complex reworking of the Gregorian chants used in the Kyrie sections. The ricercars and canzonas are often multi-subject pieces fully comparable to Bach's more ambitious fugues. Croci's performance is all about clarification of complex detail. He plays a marvelous small modern organ in Bern, Switzerland, modeled on Italian Renaissance instruments; it brings out the individual polyphonic lines much better than would a giant church organ, and, perhaps more than in any other recording, Frescobaldi's musical flowers live up to their collective title. Excellent intimate but not overbearing engineering from Italy's Stradivarius label adds to the beauty.