Giovanni Picchi

Canzoni da sonar Concerto Scirocco con ogni sorte d’istromenti Giulia Genini Giovanni Picchi English ⁄ Français ⁄ Italiano ⁄ Tracklist Menu A keyboard player between church and chamber by Rodolfo Baroncini The composer, organist and harpsichordist Giovanni Matteo Picchi was born in Venice on the 16th November 1572 to Girolamo, son of Giovanni, and Paulina, daughter of Iseppo, a «sonador» from Vicenza, son of Giovanni Battista. A versatile musician, perfectly at ease in the practice of both secular and church music, Picchi lived and worked most of his life in Venice in the parish of San Tomà, a large district in the San Polo sestiere, which was particularly strategic due to two important institutions; the «Ca’ Granda», the minor basilica of Santa Maria Gloriosa dei Frari, itself the largest church in the city, and the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, the most influential of the six devotional confraternities which could qualify for the title of «grandi». It was probably his maternal grandfather Iseppo, harpsichordist («sonator clavicem- bani») and son of Giovanni Battista of Vicenza, to first introduce his grandson to the harp- 2 sichord, guiding him towards a musical practice closely linked to dance music, which enjoyed widespread popularity and a prestigious tradition in Venice. It is plausible that another relative, Battista Picchi (perhaps a paternal uncle), resident in San Tomà and organist in the San Barnaba parish church, saw to Picchi’s training as organist and church musician- the other fundamental pillar of the composer’s musical career. Lastly, his close ties with Giovanni Croce, corroborated by two registry documents from 1597 and 1603 Rodolfo Baroncini, formerly a professor at the University of Parma, currently teaches Music History and Historiography at the Conservatoire of Adria (Rovigo). After diverse studies into the instrumental music for ensemble from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, his research has focused on the musical environment of Venice and local private patronage of the time, culminating in a comprehensive monograph on Giovanni Gabrieli (Palermo, L’Epos, 2012). He is a member of the scientific committee of “Venetian Music – Studies”, a series of scholarly texts edited by Brepols. He also collaborates with the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice for whom he has coordinated since 2014 an international seminar on Venetian musical sources. English lead us to believe that it was indeed Croce, vicemaestro and subsequently maestro di cap- pella from 1603 in St. Mark’s Basilica, who took care of Picchi’s musical education. The first trace of Picchi’s musical activity is documented in a baptismal record of 1591, where he is described as organist in San Tomà parish church; his appointment to the prestigious role of organist in the Basilica dei Frari, a post Picchi held until his death, probably took place between 1594 and 1597. He married Girolama Brunetti, daughter of Giovanni, a pastry maker in the Sant’Angelo district, on the 1st December 1597 in the house of Giovanni Boraggia, silk merchant of the parish of San Simeon Grande; Giovanni Croce was present as ring-bearer, as was the Pa- triarch Matteo Zane’s chaplain. The union produced fourteen children: nine boys and five girls. Because of the obligatory mention of a child’s godfathers on any birth certificate, the baptismal records regarding this substantial offspring bears witness to the dense network of protection and patronage which the composer created during his lifetime, offering a previously unexplored insight into his activities outside the church and the institutions. From the birth records it emerges, for example, that there was a particularly close relationship with certain influential members of the Donà family of San Stin and San Tro- vaso. Iseppo Domenico, Picchi’s first-born son, was held at his baptism by Antonio Donà, 3 son of Nicolò and nephew of the Doge Leonardo. Donà, who plausibly employed Picchi as a harpsichord teacher and player of dance music, enjoyed a brilliant diplomatic career as ambassador, first in Savoy, then in England. The nature of the second posting offers an explanation as to the presence of a toccata by Picchi in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book. The composer’s fame as performer of dance music and the degree of appreciation among his Venetian patrons are confirmed by the appearance in 1600 of his likeness in the frontispiece of Nobiltà di dame by Fabrizio Caroso, the greatest dance treatise of the time. The close partnerships he developed in 1602 with eminent keyboard players in the area, such as the harpsichordist Camillo Ogliati and the organist and composer Francesco Usper symbolise the broadness of his interests and the wide range of activities he pursued during his entire career. In 1606 he competed for the post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Giovanni Evangelista, which had been occupied by Usper and which he narrowly lost by two votes to Giacomo Rondenin, a pupil of Gabrieli. While Picchi did not manage to complement his post at the Frari with appointments in other churches and confraternities during these years, his activity in private gathering spaces and palazzi was particularly intense. The registry documents relevant to the years 1605-1622 show the existence of a formidable network of patrons, among whom certain patrizi stand out; Andrea Pasqualigo di Carlo, Lazzaro Mocenigo di Nicolò, Stefano Bolani di Andrea (already a patron of the Bolognese lutenist Ettore Tanara), Girolamo Zen di Si- mon (patron of the second Accademia veneziana), Bianca Barbarigo (Picchi’s assiduous harpsichord student between 1612 and 1620) and the cittadini Giovanni Fiandra (merchant of the Scuola Grande di San Rocco), the secretary of the Council of Ten Pietro Dar- duin and the German merchant Gasparo Chechel (to whom Martino Pesenti’s Correnti e balletti da cantarsi a 1 voce are dedicated). It is thanks to these ties that, in 1619, Picchi published Intavolatura di balli d’arpicordo, one of the rare collections of music for keyboard moulded on contemporary dance music. On the 28th August 1612 he competed for the post of organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, vacant after Giovanni Gabrieli’s death. The competition, in which Giovanni Battista Riccio and Giovanni Battista Grillo also participated, was won by the latter, but Picchi contested the result on the basis of its lack of transparency and appealed to the Council of Ten. The appeal was granted and the Scuola was forced to announce a new 4 contest, to which Picchi did not, however, apply. The incident did not end here. On the 11th March 1614, following an attempt to be elected to the post by corrupting an official of the Scuola, Picchi was banished from all future jobs at the confraternity: but this sentence was overturned on the 21st March, on the grounds that it was contrary to the school’s statutes. On the 5th March 1623, after Grillo’s death, he finally obtained the coveted position, and on the 1st May he attempted the ascent to the post of first organist in San Marco, a position which was instead assigned to Carlo Fillago. On the 16th September 1624 he competed again, without success, for the post of second organist in the Basilica, for which Giovanni Pietro Berti was nominated. The publication of the Canzoni da sonar con ogni sorte d’istromenti in 1625 constitutes the last act in a musical career which seems to have continued without further significant events until the composer’s death, which occurred on the 19th May 1643, at the age of seventy-one. The Canzoni da sonar, containing 19 compositions for different groupings and combinations of instruments, belong to the Venetian tradition of the canzone-sonata for concertante instruments and basso continuo. With the exception of the three rather more traditional polychoral canzoni for eight voices, all of the pieces are composed for English the instruments most in use in Venetian musical practice: violin, cornett, recorder, sack- but and bassoon. The collection remained long overlooked, perhaps due to the improper classification on behalf of musicological historiography of the 1970s as belonging to the more traditional forms of instrumental Venetian music of the time; Concerto Scirocco’s remarkable complete recording of the publication sheds new light on it. More than the Balli d’arpicordo, the collection contains traces of the composer’s formative and performative experience: his training with Croce, evident in the contrapuntal diligence which character- ises all of the canzoni; his familiarity with the genre of dance music, evident in the gener- ous use of dotted rhythms; his extensive experience as an organist at the Frari, reflected in the presence of large-scale works for 6 and 8 voices (absent in the contemporaneous canzoni and sonate by Riccio and Castello), typical of the liturgical musical practice in Venice. Picchi’s canzoni were inevitably influenced by the great instrumental works of Gabri- eli, an influence traceable in certain literal quotations of the famous Sonata con tre violini and in the contented use of unusual melodic intervals. Even the new, arduous concertante style of Dario Castello is captured in the virtuosic bassoon part of the Canzon Seconda. In any case, Picchi’s work does not lack a flair of its own: his best results are perhaps obtained when the aforementioned ingredients are synthesised within a cohesive structure 5 where, as happens in the Canzon Quarta, the continuous thematic repetitions give the piece a coherent and clear musical direction. Venice, January 2020 Canzoni da sonar con ogni sorte d’Istromenti by Giulia Genini The title of Giovanni Picchi’s collection may appear placid compared to contemporaneous publications such as Castello’s Sonate concertate in stil moderno or Marini’s Affetti musicali: it contains the generic formula of the first Venetian collections, per ogni sorta di strumenti (Vincenti 1588 and Raveri 1608).

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