Frescobaldi Fiori Musicali – Organ Masses Richard Lester (organ); The Greenwood Consort/Mark Bennett SOMM SOMMCD 0661 79:53 mins
Girolamo Frescobaldi was a key figure in late-Renaissance and early-Baroque music whose influence as a composer and keyboard player spread beyond his native Italy and continued well into the 17th and 18th centuries. This new recording of his set of liturgical organ pieces, published in 1635 under the title Fiori Musicali (Musical Flowers), offers a fresh take on his last completed work.
Organist Richard Lester is joined by four singers from the Devon-based choral and instrumental group The Greenwood Consort – Liam Fleet, Eden Bishop, Joshua Thomas-North and director Mark Bennett – who provide plainchant and obligato voice for five of Frescobaldi’s Kyrie settings. Lester himself tackles Frescobaldi’s eclectic and at times fiendishly complex keyboard writing on the double-manual organ of St John’s Church, Bridgetown in Totnes. The dignified gravitas of the ricercar movements and the song-like buoyancy of the canzoni sections are well captured, as is the wistful cheekiness of the two capriccios based on folk melodies that conclude the third mass. But it is in the mystical and astonishingly chromatic toccatas (to be played during the elevation of the host) that Lester excels.
Although the three organ masses (for some reason ordered on this disc as numbers 2, 1 and 3) were probably written for Venice, there is no attempt to reproduce the ambience of St Mark’s, or of St Peter’s in Rome, where Frescobaldi worked as organist. The recorded sound is warm and close, and the odd click and scrape of the organ stops only add to the sense of personal and reflective intimacy.
John-Pierre Joyce