The radiance of a Venetian Christmas

Titled Natale Veneziano, this album draws on the works that La Serenissima reserved for Christmas celebrations: motets, psalms, and antiphons in which Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli, Schütz, Monteverdi, and Cavalli converse across time. The programme, built from a tightly focused selection, highlights the diversity of styles that shaped Venetian liturgy, combining a taste for experimentation with scrupulous attention to the text. Supported by the choir of Il Pomo d’Oro, conducted by tenor Giuseppe Maletto, the recording is released by Arcana / Outhere. As the holiday season approaches, Total Baroque Magazine asked the Italian conductor four questions to understand the choices behind this project.

This recording spans nearly a century of Venetian music, from Gabrieli to Cavalli. In your view, what unites these composers despite the evolution of styles and the historical events that shaped La Serenissima?

Giuseppe Maletto: Modernity and experimentation unite all these composers. Thanks to its wealth and its relative independence from Rome, Venice was the most coveted destination for composers of the time. Here, they were free to experiment with new solutions designed to highlight the expressive situations of the texts—and from this freedom emerged major musical innovations. Andrea Gabrieli, the earliest composer on this album, introduces for example a freer writing style closer to the madrigal, contrasting with the seriousness of his famous contemporary Palestrina. His nephew Giovanni invents a highly distinctive style, very dense, developing the interaction between voices and instruments. This style—through his student Schütz, who also studied in Venice with Alessandro Grandi and certainly knew Monteverdi—would become the foundation for the rise of great German music. As for Monteverdi, he hardly needs introduction, and Cavalli may be considered his most important heir.

The works on this programme belong to the Christmas liturgy, a moment of joy and light that seems to rise above the political and religious tensions of the period. How did this profoundly spiritual dimension shape your interpretation?

G. M.: Today, when speaking of Venetian sacred music—and Monteverdi in particular—people tend to emphasise innovation, the virtuosity of the writing and vocal style, forgetting that these works were not only meant to inspire wonder, but also to provide solemnity and splendour to the liturgical offices. The compositional devices and vocal turns of phrase are always linked to the text, with the intention of guiding the listener into a spiritual dimension and inviting them to meditate on the words of the liturgy. The constant and deliberate use of madrigalisms in the sacred music of these composers shows how attentive they were to the comprehension of the text, and therefore how important the theological and spiritual dimension was for them. All this must resonate in the interpretative choices: constantly highlighting the expressive situations of the text, avoiding excessively fast tempi and excessive use of unwritten ornaments, which too often lean more towards display than towards the authentic spirit of this music.

Many of these works reflect the “Venetian style”: music conceived for several choirs in dialogue, playing with space, resonance, and sonic perspectives. How did you approach this spatial dimension and the balance of the voices in order to reveal its full expressive power?

G. M.: Probably first experimented with by Adrian Willaert, in response to the unique acoustics of St Mark’s Basilica, what we now call the “Venetian style” was in fact, from the second half of the sixteenth century onward, a widespread practice. Palestrina, for example, wrote numerous compositions for cori spezzati (“divided or separate choirs”). Depending on the venue and the placement of the voices, these works create highly evocative acoustic effects in concert. For a recording, however, sound capture imposes different constraints: a configuration too far from the microphones would be counterproductive. In the double-choir pieces we selected, there are no echo effects: the two choirs have equal sonic weight and are simply placed on either side of the stereo image.

Among all the pieces on the programme, which seems most naturally connected to Christmas, or which moves you most personally in this context? And why?

G. M.: The programme follows the sequence of pieces from a Vespers liturgy, without claiming to be a strict reconstruction. It therefore includes works—Monteverdi’s psalms and the Magnificat—that could be performed at Christmas as well as on other feast days throughout the year. Alternating with these psalms are compositions more specifically intended for Christmas.

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Each piece we selected reflects a different aspect of the holiday. For example, Schütz’s Hodie Christus natus est is the most solemn and festive; Andrea Gabrieli’s Angelus ad pastores delicately paints the scene of the angel’s apparition announcing the child’s birth. The extraordinary O Iesu mi dulcissime by the nephew Giovanni is one of the most intense works of its time, both spiritually and musically. It combines moments of great intimacy with more solemn passages, always within a “nocturnal” atmosphere imbued with deep contemplation—perfectly suited to the event of Christ’s birth. Cavalli’s Salve Regina, with its astonishing expressive intensity, can be seen as the triumphant conclusion of the long and rich tradition of polyphonic Salve Regina.