Cover photo: Bruce Dickey, cornettist, and soprano Hana Blažíková (Photo: Vojtech Havlík)
Rather like the guitar today, in the early 16th century in Italy the cornetto (the trumpet forerunner) was played by all and sundry, both the Everyman in the street and in the cathedrals and halls of the mighty. When a well-made instrument was played with skill, the sound was close to the voice of a fine singer. But when in 1630 the plague visited Italy, many of the best cornetto players died, along with their colleagues the players of sackbuts (early trombones). They were replaced with violins and celli and never regained their former prominence.
Made of wood, slightly curved, and covered with a tight leather skin, the cornetto is exceedingly difficult to play well, but Bruce Dickey (brother to local instrument builder Phillip Dickey) has become probably the world’s finest exponent of the instrument, and Pacific MusicWorks brought him here for an early-November concert at St. James Cathedral, together with Czech soprano Hana Blažíková.
Titled “Breathtaking” for the mode of performance, the virtuosic styles of the music presented, and the extraordinary ability of the performers, the concert included 16th-century Italian songs and arias, plus a contemporary work by Greek composer Calliope Tsoupaki commissioned for the recording made from this program. The two were backed up by Baroque violinists Monica Huggett and Tekla Cunningham, viola da gamba player Joanna Blendulf, theorbo player and guitarist Stephen Stubbs, and harpsichordist and organist Michael Sponseller.
The acoustics of St James were perfect for this performance. From the first notes emanating from voice and cornetto there was a sense that the audience was in for a rare treat.
Dickey’s cornetto has the clarion quality of today’s trumpet without its brassiness. It’s smooth and velvety, rich and expressive, a nonwavering clear sound which carried easily to the far reaches of the cathedral. Blažíková’s voice could be described similarly. It has that same clarion quality, rich and with depth but clear, only a hint of vibrato here and there, no edge, but a fullness of sound and highly expressive. Her major career in Europe has focused on Baroque and earlier music, perfect for her voice, but vocally she could be equally at home on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera.
Both encompassed the fast and intricate ornamentation of the music’s era with ease.
Arias by a who’s who of Italian composers in that heyday of musical flowering included for instance Sigismondo D’India’s “Dilecto meus,” a slow, sensuous love letter from the Song of Solomon, and his “Langue al vostro languir” (“My heart aches…”) a expressively passionate, ornamented interweaving of cornetto and voice. In Tsoupaki’s “Melena imi,” (“I am black but beautiful”) sung in Greek and again from the Song of Solomon, the composer has created long lines for one instrument which are imperceptibly taken over by the other so one can hardly tell where the cornetto fades and the voice begins, so seamless is the changeover. It’s a fine new work which fits the Baroque style but its contemporary origin is clear also.
Most of the works had slow and fast sections each showing off the capabilities of the soloists and one can imagine them sung in the court salons of the day. Interspersed with the songs were several brief instrumental sonatas. The violin sound is much lighter than the cornetto, and in some duets between cornetto and violin, the violin sound got a bit lost in comparison in the vastness of the cathedral.
The concert ended with two short operatic excerpts from Battista Bassani’s “La Morte delusa” and Alessandro Scarlatti’s “Rosinda ed Emireno,” fitting endpieces to a superb performance by all involved, with unceasing interest in the music and the voice/cornetto interaction.
