Bernardi: Motetti in cantilena – Ensemble Cantimbanco

Nobody remembers Stefano Bernardi, and that’s a shame worth correcting on a rainy Tuesday afternoon with nothing but a good pair of speakers and patience.

Verona gave the world Catullus, and much later, this obscure choirmaster who studied in Rome, went home to run the cathedral music, then ended his days improbably in Salzburg, helping consecrate a cathedral that would one day echo with Mozart. Between those bookends lies a body of work almost nobody plays. The op. 5 motets recorded here — complete, mercifully, since fragments of this repertoire tend to circulate in scholarly limbo — date from 1613, right in that hinge moment when the old polyphonic Italy was giving way, unevenly, reluctantly in places, to the new.

Bernardi hedges his bets, and it’s the hedging that makes this music interesting. He’s not Monteverdi torching the rulebook. He’s something more cautious: a working church artist absorbing the concertato principle — that push-pull between soloists and ripieno that Giovanni Croce had already tried under the same “cantilena” banner — without abandoning the contrapuntal discipline that got him his job in the first place. You hear it constantly on this disc. A duet of tenors spins out an ornamented line, all portamento and suspended dissonance, then the full choir crashes in like a door swinging open, instruments doubling the voices, occasionally embroidering them with their own quick figuration. It’s cori spezzati thinking shrunk down from the Venetian basilica scale to something a provincial cathedral choir could actually manage on a Sunday.

The instrumental canzoni — called sonate in the partbooks, a small but telling inconsistency the composer apparently didn’t bother to resolve — offer relief from the liturgical density. They’re not masterpieces. But they breathe differently than the vocal writing, more athletic, less bound to text, and Ensemble Cantimbanco plays them with an easy, unforced bounce that suggests real familiarity with this repertoire’s idiom rather than just its notation.

Roberto Balconi conducts — and sings countertenor himself in places, I believe, though the notes don’t always make the roster crystal clear — with an evident affection for the music’s modesty. That’s the right instinct. Bernardi is no revolutionary. Play this back to back with Viadana’s Cento concerti ecclesiastici, another landmark of this transitional decade, and Bernardi sounds almost conservative by comparison, less willing to let a solo voice simply float unsupported over continuo the way Viadana sometimes dares. But conservatism handled skillfully has its own reward. The ensemble’s blend is lovely: boy-trebleish purity from the top voices, though I suspect these are women, warmly covered tone from the lower parts, everything knit together without excessive vibrato smearing the harmonic lines.

Balance issues crop up. In a few of the denser tutti passages the theorbo and organ continuo recede too far back, and you lose the harmonic underpinning just when the polyphony gets thickest, around the “Laudate Dominum” setting, if my ear serves. Minor complaint. The recorded acoustic — some resonant Italian church, unnamed but audibly generous — flatters the voices without turning everything to mush, which is no small feat given how much of this music depends on hearing individual lines emerge and submerge within the texture.

Is this an essential disc? No. Nothing here rivals the best sacred monody that Monteverdi, Grandi, or even Viadana left behind. But essential isn’t always the right yardstick. Sometimes the historical value lies precisely in the second-tier figure, the composer who shows you what the ordinary, working-level absorption of a stylistic revolution actually looked like, day to day, parish to parish. Bernardi was that composer. Cantimbanco and Balconi give him an advocacy he’s rarely received, and if the results occasionally feel more dutiful than transcendent, well, so, probably, did Bernardi’s own career. Recommended, with modest expectations properly calibrated.