This modern music had its birthplace in Northern Italy, where cities and courts alike nurtured the development of instrumental virtuosity. One center of violin playing was at the court of Mantua, where the Gonzagas had long supported the arts. G.B. Buonamente was one of their court musicians, who may well have worked under Monteverdi during his years there. After the marriage of Eleanora Gonzaga to Emperor Ferdinand II in 1622, Buonamente moved to Vienna, where he served as musicista di camera at the Imperial Court for several years. He later held church positions in various Northern Italian towns, including Bergamo, Parma, and finally Assisi. His three violin sonata is full of a kind of rapturous lyricism, including flights up to a high E – an exceptionally high range for the violin at the time.

One of the figures who spanned both the late Renaissance and the modern style of the new century was Giovanni Gabrieli, who spent the height of his career as director of music at Venice’s San Marco. He was one of the first composers to specify instrumentation in his works, and one of the earliest to write sonatas. His great work for three violins uses all the tricks he knew to enrich the great sonic environment of the basilica – echoes, dialogues, musical exchanges – but in a miniature form, with only three violins rather than three choirs of instruments. This piece may well have been heard by the English traveler Thomas Coryat, who heard three violins play together at the Scuola di San Rocco around 1610: “each was so good that I never heard the like before.”

The similarly-named Domenico Gabrielli is actually no relation. A virtuoso on the cello in the later seventeenth century, he became well-known in his native town of Bologna and at the Este court in Modena. Along with canons, ricercares, and sonatas for his own instrument, Gabrielli also wrote a dozen operas which received their premieres in Venice and Turin as well as Bologna. His solo cello writing demonstrates a brilliant technique, including florid passagework and double, triple, and quadruple stops.

With the music of Thomas Baltzar, we turn to another center of musical creativity in the seventeenth century, the flourishing English scene. At the Restoration, Charles II encouraged a number of Continental fashions at court, including a preference for violins instead of the traditional viola da gamba. Among the musicians he promoted was a recent émigré from Lübeck, a virtuoso whose “quick hand” could “run insensibly to the end of the fingerboard.” Thomas Baltzar joined the King’s Private Music in 1661. He was one of three violinists in the ensemble, an unusual combination that prompted several works by Jenkins and Mattheis. Baltzar’s own contribution to this genre is an expansive ten-movement suite in C major. Alas, he died “of the French pox and other distempers” only two years after his court appointment.

His colleague Nicola Matteis was a Neapolitan who arrived in England around 1670. The diarist John Evelyn was amazed when he first heard him play: “he had a stroak so sweete, & made it speake like the Voice of a man... he plaied such ravishing things on a ground as astonish’d us all.” His playing was all the more extraordinary as he seems to have held his violin exceptionally low, against his “short ribs.” Matteis wrote one extended ground for three violins in the 1680‘s that seems to have been inspired by Baltzar’s suite.

We end our first half with Henry Purcell’s magisterial contribution to the three-violin genre, the Three parts upon a ground. In this tour-de-force of counterpoint, Purcell displays a wide variety of compositional devices, which he carefully labels in the score. These contrapuntal adventures - many of them extremely virtuosic for the players - unfold over the classic descending four-note ground of the passacaglia. This work is thus both an homage to the great scene-ending passacaglias of his contemporary Jean-Baptiste Lully and Purcell’s own tribute to the three-violin works of Restoration England.

The important early violinist-composer Biagio Marini was originally from Brescia, but moved to Venice in 1615 and became a violinist at San Marco, where he worked closely with Monteverdi. By 1620 he was appointed maestro di cappella in his native Brescia, then became an instrumentalist at the Farnese court in Parma. He traveled widely, serving as capellmeister to the Wittelsbach court in Germany, and also worked in Ferrara, Milan, and Bergamo. His Op. 8 collection from 1629 uses some striking effects, including the sonic drama of a sonata in ecco. Nearly thirty years later, Marini published his next instrumental collection, op. 22, which includes an especially touching passacaglio.

The virtuoso violinist Marco Uccellini directed music for several of the important courts in northern Italy, first in Modena and then at Padua; he may well have studied violin with Buonamente in Assisi as a boy. His Sonata duodecima from his second collection of sonatas, published in 1642, moves deftly and sonorously through several changes of meter, in a style reminiscent of Buonamente’s own violin-writing.

With the Prelude and Morlake Ground by John Blow, we return to Restoration London, and the pungent and inventive music of a close friend and mentor of Purcell’s. Blow resigned his position as organist at Westminster Abbey in 1679 to make way for his pupil Purcell; he returned there after Purcell’s untimely death in 1695. Blow’s works are marked by an acerbic energy that later generations found problematic. Charles Burney devoted several pages in his history of music to illustrations of what he called “Blow’s Crudities.” But it is exactly this energy that makes his music so appealing today. In his keyboard music, Blow frequently explored the possibilities offered by the repeating patterns of ground basses; his Morlake (or Mortlak’s) Ground offers an energtic series of variations over a version of the ciacona bass-line, including some surprising swerves into minor.

Another important Brescian violinist was the virtuoso G. B. Fontana, who seems to have worked in Venice, Rome, and Padua. His works survive in a memorial anthology published after his death from “the voracity of the pestilence.” Fontana’s works have a characteristic alternation between utter clarity and surprisingly wayward figuration. In his great sonata for three violins, it is the third violin that (unusually) is given a stile moderno solo, full of ornaments and jazzy rhythms, while the other two join together in close-harmony duets.

This “new style” of Italian writing found its way very quickly to Germany. The great master Heinrich Schütz made two trips to Italy, once to learn the great style of Giovanni Gabrieli and then to discover the new developments in the music of Monteverdi and his colleagues. One of Schütz’s pupils back in Dresden was Johan Vierdanck, who praised the young choirboy as “a fine, modest person and making a very good, solid beginning in composition.” Vierdanck went on to become a violinist and organist in several cities in Northern Germany, finishing his career in Stralsund. He published two collections of instrumental music, the second of which included several duets and trios for the unusual scoring of violins without any continuo accompaniment.

We end our program with one of the most recognizable works of the seventeenth century, here paired with its less familiar companion piece, a virtuosic gigue for three violins and continuo. Johann Pachelbel would doubtless be surprised to be best known for a chamber piece today; he was a leading organist of his day, and praised as a “perfect and rare virtuoso” by his colleagues. After some years of study in Regensburg and Vienna, he spent most of his career in Erfurt and Stuttgart, ending his career as the distinguished town organist of his native Nuremberg.

—Robert Mealy