The Neapolitan school of the early eighteenth century remains one of the great underexplored territories in Baroque music — and not, I think, because the music is thin. It’s because the composers who worked there have been overshadowed so completely by the fame of a few names, Alessandro Scarlatti chief among them, that the rest have been left to gather dust in libraries and specialist catalogs. This album from Maurice Steger and an accomplished period ensemble sets out to change that, and largely succeeds.
Start with what Steger actually does with a recorder. The sound he draws from the instrument — warm in the chalumeau-adjacent lower register, clean and slightly reedy above the break — never feels like a demonstration. He phrases with a singer’s instinct for where the line wants to breathe, and his ornaments are selective, never decorative for its own sake. In the Sarro concerto in a minor, the slow movement arrives with a quality of suspended time that the instrument, in less assured hands, could never sustain. It sustains here.
The program itself is a minor act of scholarship. These works cluster around a remarkable manuscript — the Manoscritto di Napoli of 1725 — that gathered concertos and sinfonie from composers active in the city, Mancini, Fiorenza, Barbella, Sarro among them, along with pieces by both Scarlatti generations. What’s striking about the manuscript is that it treats “concerto” and “sonata” as essentially interchangeable labels, which tells you something about how fluid formal categories still were in 1725. The music doesn’t care about the terminology. Neither should we.
Nicola Fiorenza is the real discovery here. His sinfonia in a minor — the dates on the man are genuinely uncertain, born somewhere around 1700 — sprawls across more than ten minutes with a kind of dark, restless energy. It doesn’t resolve easily. The harmonic language is more chromatic than you might expect, the textures denser, and there’s a minor-mode intensity that makes Alessandro Scarlatti, heard immediately after, sound almost courtly by comparison. Scarlatti père improvises — or rather the ensemble improvises in his name — upon the Follia, that endlessly productive harmonic ground that every composer from Corelli forward seemed compelled to visit. The result here is genuinely improvisatory in feeling, which is harder to bring off than it sounds.
Francesco Mancini’s sonata in g minor closes the main program, and it’s worth noting that Mancini had already published a set of recorder sonatas in London a year before this manuscript was assembled — London, not Naples, because England was still the recorder’s primary market, its culture of amateur music-making hungry for the instrument in a way that Italy was not quite yet. There’s something almost cosmopolitan about Mancini’s idiom here, a fluency that suggests a composer comfortable writing for export.
The attribution question hanging over the final concerto in G — Leonardo Leo, probably, though the question mark in the booklet is honest — doesn’t diminish the pleasure of it. Whoever wrote it understood the recorder’s capacity for a certain kind of lyrical expansiveness, and at nearly fifteen minutes it earns its length. Steger’s colleagues deserve credit here: Daniele Caminiti’s archlute and theorbo provide a continuo foundation that is active without being intrusive, and Naoki Kitaya’s harpsichord fills in the texture with exactly the right weight.
The DVD component — a short documentary filmed at the recording sessions in Arlesheim — is a genuine supplement rather than the usual promotional filler.
Dinko Fabris, in the booklet notes, floats the idea that a visit to Naples in 1725 by Johann Joachim Quantz — Frederick the Great’s future flute tutor — somehow catalyzed this sudden flowering of recorder concertos. I find this less than persuasive. Quantz was a transverse flute player, and whatever inspiration he might have provided, it seems a long logical step to a burst of recorder writing. The simpler explanation is that the recorder was enjoying a last European vogue before the transverse flute displaced it entirely, and Neapolitan composers were responsive to market forces like composers everywhere.
None of which matters much when the music is playing. This is a beautifully recorded, intelligently assembled disc that makes a genuine case for a neglected repertory. Essential for anyone with a serious interest in the Baroque, and more than that — it’s simply good music, well played.
