A bit of Frescobaldi

Here is a short Toccata from Fiori Musicali, by Girolama Frescobaldi.  This was one of the pieces on the programme from the concert last week, and I recorded it during a practice session at St Cuthbert's Presbyterian Church, Brighton.  The piece which follows this Toccata is the famous Ricercare for keyboard and obbligato instrument, in this case a trumpet.  Sadly, I didn't have time to get a recording of the second piece.  Maybe another time.

I think Frescobaldi is one of the more difficult composers to get one's head around.  He's a bit like Cesar Franck: it's very easy to get the notes right, to get the basic sound right, to play things fast, slow and every extreme in between, but there's something else that you either 'get' or don't 'get.'  I found Frescobaldi a huge challenge to grasp as an undergraduate.  I suspect that being more occupied with reading books about music and being a big thought bubble precluded engaging with his music on the emotional level it seems to demand.  There's something intense about the guy.  This shouldn't come as a surprise, given the times and places in which he worked, which you can survey from the short biography on Wikipedia.

I've often speculated about which later composers bear the closest affinities with Frescobaldi.  After all, he calls for a high degree of rubato, a type of flexibility in tempo that we associate with the unmeasured preludes of Louis Couperin (well, you kind of have the freedom to make the rhythmic shapes up for yourself there...) or perhaps more immediately with the piano music of Frederic Chopin.  On another level, there's the sheer contrapuntal genius, and the only figure who bulks large in this direction is Bach.  Then there's the emotional intensity of everything: is it like Mozart, with his giddy changes of mood, or are we heading in a more serious direction -- Beethoven's, Berlioz's, and Brahms's deep sincerity and reserve?

So this is the challenge to us moderns.  We can think through style with an incredible array of reference points, but when we take Frescobaldi to the organ we ultimately have to make a choice about the sound.  This was always my biggest hangup about playing this music, given that I acquired a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of registration practice as an undergraduate, combined with the necessity to always compromise with the organs one has to play from week to week.  There are no really good examples of sixteenth century-style Italian organs in Australia, which featured split registers and individually-drawn ranks.  So the compromise has to be between what I think might be the sort of sound an Italian organist of a particular period might have chosen in approaching a small toccata of this type, and the instrument I have available.  What is the tonal colour that fits the genre most closely?  I know that toccatas such as this one could be registered in a variety of ways, including a chorus, using smaller groups of flutes, a solo diapason, or the plaintive Voce Humana, an undulating flue stop (not the vox humana, which is a short-length reed stop).  I have chosen to try to 'fake' the Voce Humana by using the swell Open Diapason with the Voix Celestes.  It's up to you, as the listener, to decide whether the effect was successful or not.

Listen to it here.