Markus Utz - L'Organo di Novalesa (2012)

This disc of music from the early Baroque and late Renaissance -- in the realm of keyboard music the distinction is much less clear than in vocal music -- is performed on a moderate-sized, newly restored Italian organ whose voice is marvelously well suited to the repertoire. Performing even the big contrapuntal pieces of Girolamo Frescobaldi on a modern organ tends to obscure details in the music and the variety of sounds it contains, to dampen the exciting feeling of a group of musicians working in a genre that was rapidly growing. Frescobaldi is one of the few composers who are at all familiar in the set presented here. Most are Italian (Giovanni de Macque was one of the last of the Netherlanders to make the transalpine trek), and the outlines of the music are conventional for keyboard music of the years around 1600: there are toccatas, ricercare (the polyphonic ancestor of the fugue), a few pieces based on dances that were nevertheless fully usable in liturgical contexts, short variation sets, and several pieces of a fanciful or experimental nature. These last are the most striking to the listener, and the most vividly rendered by organist Markus Utz and his instrument: hear the bizarrely chromatic Consonanze stravagante (track 14) and Durezze, e ligature (apparently a kind of study, track 12), and also the Capriccio sopra il Cucu (track 8), an organ fantasy on a bird call that includes a high-pitched twitter somehow generated by the player. But the rest of the music is equally attractive, with the contrapuntal piece nicely structured so as to show the ways the composers explored the evolving harmonic system and a nice light touch on the toccatas and dances. A nice find for any lover of organ music.