Pasquini: Keyboard Works and Roman Baroque Legacy

Rome in the mid-seventeenth century was a city that ran on music the way it ran on marble and intrigue, and Bernardo Pasquini was at the center of all of it. We know him mostly through his keyboard works — the toccatas and variation sets that place him squarely between Frescobaldi and Domenico Scarlatti in the grand Italian lineage — but that picture has always been incomplete. Pasquini wrote operas, oratorios, cantatas, and who knows what else that hasn’t surfaced yet. He worked regularly with Corelli. He taught Zipoli, possibly young Scarlatti. He played for the Borghese, charmed Queen Christina of Sweden, and moved among the cardinal-patrons who shaped Roman musical life as casually as they shaped theology. This was a man embedded in the full texture of his world.

Which makes the neglect of his vocal music all the more puzzling.

The two passion cantatas collected here are, as it turns out, not even listed in New Grove. That’s either a scholarly embarrassment or an invitation, depending on how you look at it. Both works occupy a comfortable middle ground between the intimate cantata and the sacred oratorio — dramatic in impulse, devotional in purpose, and, in their finest moments, genuinely moving in ways that remind you how much seventeenth-century Roman composers understood about the expressive weight of a single melodic line over a walking bass.

Hor ch’il Ciel fra densi horrori is the more unusual of the pair. The conceit is striking: soprano and bass between them voice five allegorical figures — Earth, Sea, Air, Moon, Sun — all drawn into the anguish of the Crucifixion while humanity itself, pointedly, remains unmoved. It’s a sharp theological provocation dressed in pastoral imagery, and Pasquini rises to it. The opening sinfonia is brief but purposeful, and then the recitatives begin their work. These are not perfunctory connective tissue. Pasquini’s recitative has real inflection — the harmonic rhythm tightens where grief demands it, eases where reflection intervenes — and you can hear how carefully he studied Frescobaldi’s chromatic language and translated it into a vocal idiom.

The arias, admittedly, are short. Some barely extend beyond a single affective gesture before the da capo brings them around again. That could feel thin. Here it mostly doesn’t — mostly — because the performers understand that brevity can concentrate rather than diminish.

Sharon Rostorf-Zamir brings a clear, focused soprano to this music, her tone bright without being brittle, her ornaments tasteful rather than showy. She’s at her best in the more expressive recitative passages, where the line needs shaping rather than just support. Furio Zanasi’s baritone is darker and more seasoned — he’s been a reliable presence in this repertoire for years, and it shows in the ease with which he inhabits the bass lines without ever making them sound effortful. The two voices don’t always blend into a seamless whole when they’re together, but then Pasquini doesn’t often ask them to blend; the drama depends on contrast, on the five elemental characters speaking in their own registers.

Padre, Signore e Dio, the second cantata, follows a more straightforward dialogue structure — Christ’s triumph over death through Crucifixion and Resurrection. Less conceptually audacious than its companion, it’s arguably the more immediately satisfying piece, with a cumulative emotional logic that builds quietly toward its conclusion.

Capella Tiberina plays with clean articulation and sensible tempos under Giovanni Caruso. Nothing here is pushed for effect. The continuo realizations are unfussy, the string playing lean and direct — which suits the music, though I’d have welcomed a touch more rhythmic characterization in a few of the livelier passages, where the ensemble settles into something just slightly too comfortable.

One practical irritation: the booklet includes the Italian texts but no translations. For a album aimed at international listeners, this is a real failure of editorial nerve. Without following the words, you’re navigating by implication — which, given how text-dependent this music is, means you’re getting roughly half of what Pasquini intended.

Still. This is genuinely valuable territory. Pasquini deserves better than the footnote status his vocal music has occupied, and these performances, despite their occasional limitations, make a real case for his expressive range. A minor but genuine discovery.