Kapsberger: Il Tedesco – LEscadron volant de la Reine

German by birth, Roman by choice — the double life is right there in the nickname “Il Tedesco,” and it says something about the peculiar cosmopolitanism of the early seventeenth century that a composer from Venice by way of who-knows-where in the Empire could become one of the most sought-after musicians in the papal city without anyone thinking it odd. Kapsberger’s contemporaries did not think him a curiosity. They thought him a genius, or close enough. Kircher’s praise, fulsome even by the standards of Baroque encomium, tells us that his recitative style earned real respect among practicing musicians, not just theorists scribbling in their studies.

And yet we know him now almost entirely as a name attached to the theorbo — that ungainly, gorgeous instrument with its extra bass courses reaching up like antennae above the pegbox — because his solo lute and chitarrone music circulated widely among today’s early-music specialists and got recorded, again and again, by superb players. Rightly so. But this new disc, built around the vocal and villanella repertoire he produced during his Roman years, particularly that fertile stretch beginning around 1610, restores a dimension of the composer almost entirely absent from the catalogue.

The villanella is a strange beast to modern ears trained on the emotional flexibility of monody. It is strophic — the same music serves multiple stanzas of text — and this necessarily blunts the word-painting we prize in the more expressively free arie and madrigals of the period. Where a Caccini or a Sigismondo d’India monodic setting can chase the sense of a single line into harmonic corners, a villanella has to generalize, to find a musical shape flexible enough to serve five or six different emotional situations across as many verses. That is not a failure of the genre. It is the genre’s whole point — tunefulness over declamation, charm over rhetoric. Kapsberger, arriving in Naples sometime before making his way north to Rome, apparently absorbed the idiom completely; seven of his thirteen secular collections are devoted to it. This tells you where his popular sympathies lay, whatever the sophistication of his chitarrone fantasias.

What struck me, disc in hand, headphones on, coffee gone cold — was how the performers here refuse to condescend to the villanella as some rustic afterthought. Too many groups treat this repertoire as filler between the “real” monodies, tossed off with a wink. Not here. The ensemble brings the same textual seriousness to a strophic villanella that they’d bring to a through-composed aria, finding small variances of ornament and inflection from stanza to stanza that keep the ear engaged without violating the genre’s essential simplicity. It is a fine, difficult balance and they mostly hit it.

The recorded sound, captured in a French church acoustic that gives the theorbo continuo just enough bloom without swallowing consonants, serves the material honestly. You hear the buzz of gut string against fret, the breath before a phrase, the small imperfections that remind you real hands are on real instruments. I could have wished for slightly more variety of vocal color across a program this length — sixty-five minutes of similar textures, however well executed, invites a certain sameness by disc’s end — but this is a minor complaint against a genuinely valuable act of repertoire excavation.

Competing recordings of Kapsberger’s instrumental music are plentiful — Rolf Lislevand, Hopkinson Smith, and others have given us superb accounts of the chitarrone works. Recordings devoted seriously to his secular vocal output are not. That scarcity alone makes this disc worth owning, but the performances earn their place independent of the novelty. Kapsberger deserves better than his one-dimensional reputation as a specialist’s specialist. This disc argues, convincingly, that he was a considerably richer composer than the lute anthologies have let on.