William Dongois, the director and cornett player, studied trumpet before specializing in the cornett at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis and now teaches cornett and improvisation.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Bertali's music is a compendium of instrumental music in the stylus fantasticus, an Italian-Austrian musical language that features various stylistic devices.
Instruments
The recording features period instruments including an 18th-century Naples violin, an Ewald Meinl sackbut (copy after Drewelwecz, 1595), and a Guntram Wolf dulcian (copy after an anonymous instrument from Merano).
Composer Biography
Antonio Bertali, whose name appears in many spellings, was born in Verona in March 1605 and became court Kapellmeister in Vienna in October 1649.
Interpretation
Le Concert Brisé, the ensemble on this recording, uses musicology to understand the spirit of early music and incorporates improvisation techniques from jazz and traditional music to achieve a lively performance.
Compositional Technique
The stylus fantasticus, prominent in Bertali's sonatas, combines the strict contrapuntal style of Early Music with the stil moderno, which includes new techniques like recitative-like themes, chromaticism, and folk song evocations.
Compositional Technique
Seventeenth-century sonatas, including Bertali's, are described as 'eloquent' and function like miniature operas due to their use of dialogues and alternation of 'soli' as discourse between different characters.
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