Francesca Campana: Arie a una voce – Incomplete Survey

Francesca Campana: A Voice from the Shadows

Here’s a composer who deserves better than she’s getting on this disc.

Francesca Campana – sister-in-law to the great Luigi Rossi, accomplished spinet player, singer of apparently questionable timbre (“hoarseness” was mentioned by a contemporary, even as he praised her angelic musicianship) – published her Arie a una, due, e tre voci in 1629 and then more or less vanished from history. A second collection of madrigals appeared in 1630 but is lost. What remains are these fifteen arias and two songs from an earlier anthology. We get only the former here, though the disc runs just over an hour and could easily have accommodated those orphaned pieces. Why leave them out? The omission nags at me.

What nags more is the cavalier treatment of the music itself.

Francesco Tomasi and his ensemble Ricercare Antico have done valuable work in bringing these arias to light – genuinely valuable, given how few secular works by women from this period survive outside convent walls. But the performance choices here raise more questions than they answer. Most troubling: the pervasive use of melody instruments – recorders, violins – introducing nearly every aria, playing ritornellos between stanzas, occasionally doubling the voice with added diminutions. The title page specifies voices, not instruments. So where does this practice come from? Is there evidence I’m missing? Or is this simply an attempt to add color, to make the music more palatable to modern ears?

I suspect the latter, and it bothers me. These arias don’t need dressing up.

The four settings of a single sonnet (tracks 10–13, oddly placed in the middle of the program rather than grouped at the beginning where they appear in the original print) reveal Campana’s sophistication. Each section receives its own musical treatment – through-composed rather than strophic, emotionally responsive to the text’s shifting moods. Or so I assume. The booklet provides no texts. None. Not even a reference to where one might find them online, and they’re not readily available there either. How can we properly assess a composer’s text-setting when we don’t know what text is being set? It’s maddening.

The singers themselves are capable enough. Lila Hajosi has a warm, pliant voice, though her vibrato occasionally widens beyond what this repertoire can comfortably bear – particularly in “È già rotto lo strale,” where the violone’s pizzicato accompaniment (another unexplained choice) already fragments the texture. The two-voice pieces for high voices and bass work better; the voices blend naturally, finding that tender balance between independence and unity that makes early Baroque chamber music so intimate.

But then there’s the continuo realization, which seems to operate on the principle that more is more. Multiple keyboard and plucked instruments pile up where a single theorbo or harpsichord would suffice. The sound becomes cluttered, the harmonic rhythm obscured. And what possessed them to fade out “Amor se questa fera Nemica de gl’amanti”? It simply… dissolves into silence, as if the recording engineer got bored. Inexplicable.

The final track – a three-voice madrigal (SSB) without accompaniment, Campana looking backward to an older style – sounds like it was recorded in a different venue entirely. The acoustic suddenly blooms, becomes almost swimmy, where everything else has been close and dry. Perhaps this was meant to distinguish the piece, to signal its stylistic difference. If so, the execution is clumsy. It just sounds like a mistake.

Interspersed among the vocal works are instrumental pieces, mostly keyboard ricercari arranged for ensemble. Some work tolerably well; others would benefit enormously from being heard as originally conceived, on a single keyboard instrument where the contrapuntal lines can speak with clarity rather than being parceled out among recorders and strings. The arrangements blur what should be transparent.

I keep coming back to the fundamental question: whose vision are we hearing here? Campana’s, or Tomasi’s? The arias themselves – what we can discern of them beneath the editorial interventions – suggest a composer of real gifts. The strophic variations show melodic imagination; the through-composed pieces reveal dramatic instinct. There’s a confidence in the harmonic language, a willingness to let dissonance bite before resolving. This is not timid music.

But it’s been given a timid rendition, one that apparently lacks faith in the material’s ability to hold our attention without constant instrumental commentary. Early music performance has moved beyond this sort of thing, or should have. We trust Monteverdi’s solo madrigals to work with just voice and continuo. Why not Campana’s arias?

The album quality itself is professional – clean, well-balanced when the ensemble isn’t overcrowded, though that swimming-pool acoustic in the final track remains baffling. Brilliant Classics has done its usual competent job with production values, even if the booklet’s omission of texts is unforgivable.

So here we are: important music, inadequately served. The initiative to record Campana deserves praise. The execution doesn’t. These arias need a performance that respects their original conception – or, if departing from it, makes a convincing case for why. This disc does neither. It’s a missed opportunity, and Francesca Campana, emerging briefly from historical shadow, deserves better advocacy than she receives here.

Worth hearing for the repertoire. Not worth keeping for the performance.