BRUNETTI & LIDÓN

AT THE SPANISH ROYAL CHAMBER

• EUGENIA BOIX, GUILLERMO TURINA, KARIM FARHAN | SILVIA MÁRQUEZ CHULILLA

• IBS CLASSICAL IBS202019 | DL GR 1449-2019

In the palaces of the Spanish royal family, the apartments of the kings and infantes were large enough to accommodate a sizeable group of musicians and listeners.

This album reflects the variety of repertoire that might have been heard in the Real Cámara in the time of Carlos IV and Fernando VII. Carlos IV's interest in instrumental music is well known: besides promoting academies and concerts almost daily, he was himself a violinist. By contrast, Fernando VII's role as a patron of music is wholly unknown, even though he too fostered significant chamber music activity along the lines laid down by his father Carlos IV, with the enthusiastic participation of his wives and the infantes.

These vocal and instrumental pieces, heard in the monarchs' chamber, were composed by Gaetano Brunetti, Francisco Brunetti and José Lidón, illustrious composers in the service of the court who enjoyed great renown in their day. They deserve to be heard and enjoyed by all music lovers, who will surely be captivated by their exceptional quality.

World premiere recording

JOSÉ LIDÓN From the Cantata sobre la traducción del salmo “Diligam te Domine”: 1. Scene “Sì queste voci rispettose” 6:13 2. Aria “Che sarà? Qual cupo suono” 5:40 FRANCISCO BRUNETTI Concierto para violonchelo 3. I. Allegro con espíritu 11:12 4. II. Adagio 3:47 5. III. Rondó 6:38 JOSÉ LIDÓN From the Cantata sobre la traducción del salmo “Diligam te Domine”: 6. Recitative “Dell’immortal vittoria” 3:15 7. Aria “A dispetto vedranno, o Signore” 5:52 GAETANO BRUNETTI Lamentaciones de Miércoles Santo (1794) 8. Lamentación n.o 1 7:12 9. Lamentación n.o 2 7:47 10. Lamentación n.o 3

“Hearing the massive tutti of an ensemble of this size, 4-4-2-1 plus two oboes, two bassoons and two horns, unusual for a Spanish group, is a genuine delight in pieces of such timbral richness as those of José Lidón. Silvia Márquez Chulilla brings out perfectly the varied characters that make up these thoroughly Classical works (tumultuous, pleasing, joyful, plaintive).”

Simón Andueza | RITMO

“In Il triunfo the wrath of the Lord makes the earth tremble when it reaches "His anger burns, a living ember", in a dramatic recitative full of contrasts and orchestral effects, compacted by the low register of the fortepiano from which Márquez directs an exuberant Tempestad. Meanwhile the aria ‘Che sarà? Qual cupo suono’, though it continues the just vengeance upon King David's enemies, opens out into passages of coloratura and intoxicating cadences that allow us to appreciate the beautiful vocal breadth of the soprano Eugenia Boix.”

Alejandro Santini Dupeyrón | MELÓMANO

“Guillermo Turina proves himself a leading cellist on the historically informed scene. His performance of the virtuosic solo part of the formidable Concierto para violonchelo by Francisco Brunetti, Gaetano's son, shows why: besides possessing a most beautiful sound and excellent phrasing, he deals easily with the high, vertiginous passages, with elegant musicality.”

Simón Andueza | RITMO

“To his [Gaetano Brunetti's] virtuoso son Francisco, born in the Villa de Madrid, who learned the technique of the modern cello from Duport in Paris, we owe the only concerto for the instrument from late eighteenth-century Spain to have come down to us complete. It is a work of undoubted heritage value, and of sublime inspiration besides, which Guillermo Turina performs with masterly elegance.”

Alejandro Santini Dupeyrón | MELÓMANO

DEVOTION IN THE CHAMBER

Gaetano Brunetti, Francisco Brunetti and José Lidón

Chamber music is traditionally associated with music for a small group of instruments, yet in earlier times the chamber welcomed a great variety of repertoire, both vocal and instrumental, as well as devotional music. In the palaces of the Spanish royal family, the apartments of the kings and infantes were large enough to accommodate a sizeable group of musicians and listeners. This album brings together works linked to the musical life of the Spanish court, and reflects the variety of repertoire that might have been heard in the Real Cámara in the time of Carlos IV and Fernando VII. Carlos IV's interest in instrumental music is well known: besides promoting academies and concerts almost daily, he was himself a violinist. By contrast, Fernando VII's role as a patron of music is wholly unknown, even though he too fostered significant chamber music activity along the lines laid down by his father Carlos IV, with the enthusiastic participation of his wives and the infantes.

The works chosen for this album are vocal and instrumental pieces that were heard in the monarchs' chamber, composed by Gaetano Brunetti, Francisco Brunetti and José Lidón, illustrious composers in the service of the court who enjoyed great renown in their day. They deserve to be heard and enjoyed by all music lovers, who will be captivated by their exceptional quality.

Gaetano Brunetti: Lamentaciones del Miércoles Santo (1794)

Gaetano Brunetti, born in Fano (Papal States), arrived in Spain around 1760 and was admitted as a violinist to the Real Capilla in 1767. His excellent gifts as a “chamber violinist” soon brought him into the service of the household of the Prince of Asturias (later Carlos IV) as violin teacher and director of musical entertainments, a post he held until his death in 1798.

Brunetti thus became one of the most prominent composers of Classical-style instrumental music in the Spain of his day. The cycle of three Lamentaciones del Miércoles Santo, together with the Miserere for eight voices and bass that accompanies them, are the only surviving sacred works by Brunetti composed after he entered the service of the Spanish court. Everything indicates that these works were composed to be performed on Holy Wednesday (18 April) 1794. However, another Lamentación tercera del Miércoles Santo from the same year survives, composed by the maestro of the Real Capilla, Antonio Ugena, undoubtedly intended for performance in the public chapel of the Palacio Real in Madrid. This suggests that Brunetti may have composed his for a private performance in the King's Chamber or in the chapel of the palace at Aranjuez, where the court was then in residence. In a slightly later copy of the works, now preserved in Parma, a pair of horns was added to the first two lamentations, thereby bringing their instrumentation into line with that of the third.

The text, taken from the Book of Lamentations of the Old Testament, traditionally attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, sings of the destruction of Jerusalem and belongs to the Matins liturgy of the last three days of the Catholic Holy Week. Brunetti conceived the music in keeping with the spirit of gravity and recollection proper to that period of the liturgical calendar. This is how we should understand the constant use of mutes on the string instruments, the restrained contribution of the wind instruments and the great austerity of the vocal line. This deliberate sobriety is offset by the refined variety of textures in the orchestral accompaniment, by a daring harmonic construction and by an expressive melodic rhetoric inherited from the Baroque tradition. Attentive to the disconsolate accents of the text, Brunetti turns on the one hand to unexpected chromaticisms and forced modulations, favouring dark keys, and on the other to melodic designs capable of evoking the images of the text. Thus the undulating lines of the violins in “Migravit Judas” (first lamentation) evoke the unrelenting exodus of the Hebrew people, while the jarring juxtaposition of keys projects the desolation and debasement of the ravaged city in “Viæ Sion lugent” (first lamentation) and in “Peccatum peccavit Jerusalem” (second lamentation). Throughout the three works, Brunetti also deploys a subtle gradation of sound intensity that culminates in the third lamentation with the only passage without mutes in the strings. Its surprising effect, reinforced by the lively, brilliant writing for the violins, coincides with the verse recalling the fire sent from heaven (“De excelso misit ignem in ossibus meis”). Brunetti's triptych of Lamentaciones del Miércoles Santo ends hopefully with the joint ascent of voice and orchestra in a last, luminous plea to the people of Jerusalem to turn back to God (“Jerusalem convertere”, third lamentation).

Francisco Brunetti: Concierto para violonchelo en Re mayor (ca. 1800)

Francisco Brunetti's cello concerto in D major is a unique work in Spain's musical heritage. Although other cellist-composers, such as Pablo Vidal, Nicolás Bala and Francisco Javier Pareja, active in Madrid in the last third of the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, are known to have composed concertos for their instrument, this is the only one that has been found complete.

Francisco Brunetti, son of Gaetano Brunetti, was born in Madrid around 1765. His father's position at court as violinist of the Real Capilla, violin teacher to the Prince of Asturias (the future Carlos IV) and later director of the Real Cámara was decisive in the development of his son's musical career; it is within this courtly context that we must place Francisco Brunetti's first steps. His early training as a cellist was almost certainly provided by Domingo Porretti (1709-1784), cellist of the Real Capilla and composer of several cello concertos.

In 1782 he was granted a stipend by the then Prince of Asturias and sent to Paris to complete his training under Jean-Louis Duport (1749-1819), regarded as the father of modern cello technique. His Parisian experience placed him in a privileged musical environment. Paris stood as one of the musical cities par excellence and, as far as the cello was concerned, undoubtedly its capital; Brunetti was able to come into direct contact with the most reputed cellists of the day (the Duport brothers, Jean-Baptiste Breval, Jean-Balthasar Tricklir) and with their compositions. This contact is reflected in his own cello method, written in the 1820s, and in the rest of his works.

After his return from Paris in 1784 he began his career as a court musician: in 1785 he was a constant presence at the musical soirées held in the apartments of the Prince of Asturias; in 1787 he joined the Real Capilla; in 1789 he was appointed musician of the Real Cámara and in 1803 he was finally named its director, a post he held until his purge in 1823, apart from the years of the French invasion (1808-1814), during which he lived outside Madrid. As director of the Real Cámara, Brunetti was responsible for selecting the repertoire and introduced substantial changes with respect to the previous period, choosing works by composers little known until then and giving greater attention to the concerto genre, especially for his own instrument, a way of showing off his skills before the monarch.

The Concierto para violonchelo in D major, composed around 1800, follows the conventional structure of the genre at the time, in three movements: fast-slow-fast. The scoring also conforms to the patterns of the day: solo cello, two violins, two violas, bass, double bass, pair of oboes and pair of horns. The closing decades of the eighteenth century were a key moment for cello technique, which reached an unprecedented level of development thanks to the technical contributions of cellists such as Jean-Louis Duport. With careful deliberation, Brunetti draws the utmost from the idiomatic resources of the instrument, endowing the work with a markedly virtuosic style. He also uses in the concerto a very polished cello idiom, adopting a whole series of technical procedures absorbed through his contact with Duport's school.

The work's singularity in the Spanish musical repertoire, together with the quality of the composition, a reflection of the musical cosmopolitanism of Madrid at the time, make this concerto an essential testimony for understanding the processes of musical reception and production in Spain during the Classical period.

José Lidón: Il trionfo, cantata sacra a cuatro voces y grande orquesta sobre la traducción del salmo Diligam te Domine (ca. 1814)

Although he spent his whole career attached to the Real Capilla of Madrid, of which he was maestro from 1805, the composer José Lidón (Béjar, 1748-Madrid, 1827) showed on various occasions his interest in the Real Cámara. In 1814, after Fernando VII regained the throne, he obtained the status of honorary musician of the Cámara, although he had already held an earlier appointment as “Maestro de Capilla de la Música de su Real Cámara y Capilla” during the short reign of José I. Later, in 1824, he applied for a more considerable post, this time without success, as director of the Cámara's vocal music after the death of Carlos Marinelli, who had held that office until then.

An interesting testimony from the musician Ramón Cuéllar, dating from 1828, which notes Lidón's presence in 1814 or 1815 at a performance by the vocal section of the Real Cámara, reports that oratorios were performed there. This allows us to consider that the work by Lidón from which the two recitative and aria pairs for soprano voice included here are taken may well have been written for the King's Chamber. Its manuscript, without any indication of date, is preserved in the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid under the following title: Cantata sacra a cuatro voces, y grande orquesta; traducción del salmo 17. Diligam te Domine: en idioma italiano, por el juris-consulto D. Saverio Matey; y puesto en música por D. José Lidón, maestro de la Real Capilla de S.M.C. Despite this designation, which comes from the author of the text, Lidón himself refers to the work as an oratorio at the beginning of the score.

It is a composition for four solo voices (soprano, alto, tenor and bass), two flutes and two oboes, bassoon, two horns, violins, violas and accompaniment. Its text is the second translation of Psalm 17 made by the Neapolitan author Saverio Mattei in 1768 in his I libri poetici della Bibbia tradotti dall’ebraico originale, ed adattati al gusto della poesia italiana, here turned into a cantata for four characters, King David and his three musicians Asaph, Heman and Jeduthun, under the title Il trionfo. The psalm describes divine help in gaining victory over one's enemies and the recognition of David's authority, a theme that made it a fitting prayer for the political climate immediately after the end of the War of Independence and that allows the work to be dated around 1814. Other stylistic considerations typical of the composer's final years point the same way, such as the abandonment of dry recitative in favour of the more versatile and expressive accompanied recitative.

In the first recitative and aria, “Sì queste voci rispettose - Che sarà? Qual cupo suono”, Lidón makes effective use of the orchestra to describe, in Heman's narration, the majestic appearance of God and his manifestation in thunder and earthquakes, without neglecting the heroic character common to the whole cantata. In the second pair, the shorter recitative “Dell'immortal vittoria” and the intense aria “A dispetto vedranno, o Signore”, shortly before the end of the oratorio and sung by the same character, demanding melodic movements and strongly expressive moments for the solo voice are accompanied by energetic instrumental interventions. All this serves finally to acknowledge David's rule and his victory over his enemies, together with a sadness, perhaps highly significant, for those sons who strayed from their path.

Lluís Bertran

Iván González Rodríguez

Luis López Ruiz

Critical editions

Gaetano Brunetti: Lamentaciones del Miércoles Santo (1794). Critical edition by Lluís Bertran-ICCMU, 2019

José Lidón: Il trionfo, cantata sacra a cuatro voces y grande orquesta sobre la traducción del salmo Diligam te Domine. Critical edition by Luis López Ruiz-ICCMU, 2019.

Francisco Brunetti: Concierto para violonchelo en Re mayor, critical edition by Iván González-ICCMU, 2019.

The musical sources for the works are held in the Archivo General de Palacio, the Biblioteca Palatina de Parma, the Biblioteca Histórica Municipal de Madrid and the Biblioteca del Real Conservatorio Superior de Música de Madrid, whose staff we thank for their collaboration in carrying out the research for this project.

The works included on this CD are the result of research by the team of musicologists of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales. All have been given their modern premieres in concert by La Tempestad, under the direction of Silvia Márquez. Francisco Brunetti's Concierto para violonchelo was presented in the concert Circa 1819. Música en torno a la fundación del Museo Nacional del Prado, on 16 November 2018. G. Brunetti's Lamentaciones and the scenes from Lidón's Cantata sacra were premiered in the concert held on 14 March in the church of Santa Bárbara in Madrid as part of the Festival Internacional de Arte Sacro de la Comunidad de Madrid.

This project was coordinated by Judith Ortega and carried out within the framework of the R&D project “MadMusic. Espacios, géneros y públicos de la música en Madrid (siglos XVII-XX)” of the Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales.