Early Neapolitan Cello Music

• Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, hundreds of churches and religious houses across Naples employed musicians, singers and instrument makers. They competed with one another to present the most stylish or lavish music for liturgical use. One of the new instruments introduced in the Church was the Violoncello.

Rocco Greco and his colleague Gaetano Francone produced new music for the cello which was suitable for performance within the liturgy of the chapel. Rather as composers of alternatim organ masses wrote elaborations of chant for the organ to be played between the chanted verses of the liturgy, so Greco composed 11 virtuosic ‘diminutions’ which were elaborated from the bass part of vocal motets setting Vespers texts. In the present recording the diminutions are prefaced with a chanted version of the Gregorian antiphon on which the motets were based. Francone, meanwhile, composed a collection of 10 short Passagagli. The ten pieces, based on the passacaglia bass pattern, are written for cello and basso continuo.

Italian cellist and musicologist Matteo Malagoli specializes in little-known 19th-century repertoire, having also published research on British and Italian organs and the era of Italian Baroque music between the gamba and the cello.