Mancini Recorder Concertos – Baroque Naples Rediscovered

Naples in the early eighteenth century was a city of operatic ambition, and Francesco Mancini was very much its creature — born there in 1672, trained at the Conservatorio della Pietà dei Turchini, and scarcely ever tempted to leave. His career traced the arc of Neapolitan musical power: organist in the royal chapel, then deputy to Alessandro Scarlatti himself, and finally, after Scarlatti’s death in 1725, maestro di cappella. He composed operas by the dozen, oratorios, masses, sacred music that circulated across Europe in manuscript copies. History, typically ungrateful, has chosen to remember him mostly for a set of instrumental pieces he probably never thought to publish.

The twelve recorder concertos — they call themselves sonatas in the manuscript, concertos on the title page, and the distinction apparently meant little to anyone at the time — survive in the so-called Manoscritto di Napoli 1725, a collection that also includes works by Scarlatti, Domenico Sarri, and the London-born Robert Valentine, who reinvented himself on the continent as Roberto Valentino. Mancini’s twelve pieces were never printed. They stayed in Naples. And yet here they are, two discs’ worth, played with real intelligence by Corina Marti and Capella Tiberina under Alexandra Nigito.

Worth saying immediately: this music is not Vivaldi. Not remotely. The recorder here is not a soloist hurling itself against an orchestral machine — it is, as the old phrase has it, primus inter pares, first among equals, embedded in the ensemble texture rather than elevated above it. The model is Corelli’s sonata da chiesa, not the Venetian solo concerto. Four or five movements, modal gravity in the minor-key pieces, a certain churchly weight even when the writing turns playful.

What keeps this from sounding merely dutiful is Mancini’s counterpoint. His sacred music — the Missa Septimus is the rare piece that has made it to disc — shows the same command: voices that think for themselves and yet arrive, with something like inevitability, at cadences that feel earned. The concerto in e minor, No. 19 in the manuscript’s numbering, is a good place to hear this. The inner string parts are not mere harmonic filling; they push against the recorder line, create small frictions, and resolve them with a satisfaction that is almost physical.

The dramatic element — and this is where the opera composer shows his hand — surfaces unexpectedly. The concerto in g minor, No. 14, the longest piece on the first disc at nearly twelve minutes, moves through its slow movements with a rhetorical intensity that belongs to the stage. You can almost hear a recitative lurking behind the melodic line. Mancini knew how to shape a long emotional gesture, how to make an audience lean forward. That knowledge did not stay behind when he sat down to write for strings and a little wooden flute.

Marti’s playing is clean, warm, and — this matters — never precious. The recorder can become, in the wrong hands, an instrument of studied charm, every ornament polished to a high gloss. Marti ornaments with taste but also with purpose; her embellishments feel improvised rather than calculated, which is exactly right for this repertoire. Her tone in the lower register has real body, and she navigates the instrument’s awkward upper-octave breaks with a naturalness that only comes from years of idiomatic immersion.

Capella Tiberina plays with a lean, focused sound — bows moving efficiently, continuo realizations that support without crowding. Nigito’s tempos are well judged throughout. The concerto in B-flat, No. 10, which opens the second disc, has a lightness that could easily tip into shallowness; she keeps it buoyant without letting it become inconsequential.

A word about context. The recorder was already fighting a rearguard action in most of Europe by the 1720s — the transverse flute was winning, and composers from Telemann to Quantz were writing for the new instrument. Naples held out longer, and Mancini’s concertos are among the reasons to be glad it did. They represent a tradition of recorder writing that was genuinely distinct from the German or English varieties — more harmonically adventurous, more willing to let the bass line do structural work, more operatically inflected in the slow movements.

There is a competing set of Mancini’s twelve solo sonatas for recorder and continuo, recorded by Ensemble Tripla Concordia, which offers a useful companion to this release. The two sets are different enough in character that one does not substitute for the other. The concertos have more weight, more contrapuntal density, more of the composer’s full personality on display.

This is, in the end, a rescue operation — and a successful one. Mancini deserves better than footnote status, and Marti and Nigito make a persuasive case for these concertos as music worth returning to. Not essential repertoire, perhaps. But essential listening for anyone who takes Neapolitan Baroque seriously, and a genuine pleasure for everyone else.