Tomadin Plays the 1532 Colombi Organ at Valvasone

There is something quietly radical about silence — the silence before the first chord sounds, when you realize the room has been waiting five centuries for exactly this.

The Duomo del Santissimo Corpo di Cristo in Valvasone is not a famous place. The town sits in Friuli, northeast of Venice, and the organ built there by Vincenzo Colombi in 1532 or 1533 — the records are imprecise, as records from that era often are — is not the kind of instrument that fills survey books. Single manual, forty-seven keys, a pull-down pedalboard covering barely twenty notes, three wedge bellows wheezing away behind the scenes. Modest by any measure. And yet Manuel Tomadin has made it the centerpiece of a album that rewards close, patient listening in ways that grander projects sometimes do not.

The instrument’s temperament matters enormously here. Quarter-comma meantone, with A sitting at 492.5 Hz — slightly flatter than modern pitch, and at 22 degrees Celsius, which means the tuning will drift the moment the building heats up with bodies or cools toward evening. These are not academic abstractions. You hear them. The thirds glow with an almost vocal warmth in the diatonic harmonies, and then — when a chromatic shift pushes the tuning toward one of meantone’s notorious wolf intervals — something slightly feral enters the sound, a roughness that the music of this period was designed to court and then resolve. Tomadin understands this. He never sanitizes it.

The program moves chronologically through Venetian and Venice-adjacent keyboard music of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, opening with Annibale Padovano’s toccata. Padovano spent years at the organ of San Marco before decamping to the Habsburg court in Graz — a trajectory that tells you something about the international ambitions of these Venetian artist-diplomats. His toccata is essentially organized improvisation: chord blocks in one hand, the other hand spinning out diminutions and scales above or below. It sounds almost conversational in Tomadin’s hands, unhurried, as though Padovano were thinking aloud at the keyboard rather than demonstrating anything.

That changes with Vincenzo Bell’haver — sometimes spelled Bellavere, and the inconsistency is itself a small window into the chaotic orthography of Renaissance Italy — whose toccata introduces a more deliberate alternation between those chord blocks and the running figures. More formal architecture. Then Gioseffo Guami’s contribution pushes the virtuosity higher still, scales accumulating speed and density in ways that must have impressed sixteenth-century listeners as thoroughly as they impress now.

What Tomadin does exceptionally well is pace these contrasts without forcing them into a narrative they don’t quite contain. He’s a Friulian organist with deep roots in this repertory, and it shows — not as local boosterism, but as genuine intimacy with the music’s idioms. The fiffaro stop, a tremulant with a slightly wavering, voice-like quality, appears at judicious moments. It doesn’t dominate. It reminds you that this music was conceived in an era when the organ was expected to imitate human singing, not replace it.

The recorded sound is clean without being clinical. Da Vinci Classics has been building a useful catalog of historical Italian keyboard music, and the engineering here gives the instrument its proper acoustic context — you hear the room, the slight resonance of stone, without excessive bloom. Compared to the famous recordings made on the organs at Santa Barbara in Mantua or San Petronio in Bologna, this is obviously a more intimate proposition, a different scale of ambition entirely. But scale isn’t everything. There’s something the Valvasone organ can do — a directness, an unmediated quality — that those larger instruments, magnificent as they are, cannot quite replicate.

Not every piece on the disc is equally interesting. Some of the shorter ricercars feel like academic exercises rather than living music, and no amount of sympathetic playing fully disguises that. But the toccatas hold up, and the program’s cumulative effect — watching a musical genre mature across several decades in real time, through an instrument that actually existed in that world — is genuinely illuminating.

Worth your time. Worth repeated listening.