For voices

Anthony Hart: Concertini per Quattro Voci – Eighteenth Century Arias for Four Voices. (Edizione Antonino Reggio) Malta 2011. 107pp, illustrated.

I still remember the excitement when, during research with Mgr John Azzopardi in France’s national library in February 1990, we discovered the sacred works Nicolò Isouard composed for St John’s Co-Cathedral in Valletta between 1795 and 1798 which I had always considered lost.

Aimed at the general reader with at least some basic knowledge of music, I found the monograph absorbing and readable- Joseph Vella Bondin

It was also during this visit that I came across Girolamo Abos’s exquisite Stabat Mater (1750), which I felt I had to restore to international awareness. My edition, together with a detailed study of the composer and his times, was published in the US in 2003 by A-REditions, Inc., the first work by a Maltese composer in modern edition to be published abroad.

So I feel in complete empathy with Hart’s multi-form sponsorship of the now totally forgotten Antonino Reggio, who he rediscovered early in 2000 while consulting the works of late 18th and early19th writers.

These included the prominent English musicologist CharlesBurney who, while in Italy in 1770 to collect information for his planned book on the history of music, visited Reggio several times, describing him as “a pretty good composer and performer on the harpsichord and violoncello... eminent for his skill in the art, and learning in the science of sound” and the Roman poet and writer Giovanni Gherardo De Rossi who in 1807 described Reggio as “a man of great intellect, erudite, and very deep in music”.

Hart, a retired management consultant, university lecturer and musicologist, now resides in Malta. He studied music in the UK at the Thames Valley University/London College of Music and the lute under Diana Poulton and Chris Wilson.

As a member of the Società Italiana di Musicologia, he was invited to present papers at its conferences in Bergamo (2008) and Rome (2009). As a member of the International Musicological Society (IMS), he read a paper at its Musical Iconography Study Group Conference in Barcelona in October 2010.

His musicological studies have appeared in Early Music, published by Oxford University Press, and Fonti Musicali Italiane.

As is to be expected, most of Hart’s papers have tended to concentrate on his painstaking inquiry about Reggio, whose biography he has also succeeded in putting together.

Reggio was born in Aci Catena, a commune in the region of Catania, in 1725. Unfortunately, the date of his death has yet to be established but probably was in Rome around 1810.

He was a priest, later a monsignor, and a member of a cadet branch of the Sicilian noble family, the Principi di Campofiorito.

The majority of his originalcompositions are held in theSantini Collection in theDiözensanbibliothek, Münster.

These consist of 16 bound manuscripts comprising some 180 individual works, composed between 1745 and 1774. His early works range from sacred works, such as Masses, oratorios and sacred songs, to aria settings of texts by Metastasio. His later works, dating from about 1770, consist of sonatas for cembalo, works for two celli and sonatas for lute and bass.

Hart’s most important project so far, a monograph about one ofReggio’s principal and most interesting works and the only one to exist in more than one manuscript, has now been published.

Copies of The concertini per camera a quattro voci e basso, composed in 1767 and consisting of 20 quartets, are archived in Münster’s Diözesanbibliothek, Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, and Lisbon’s Biblioteca de Palácio Nacional da Ajuda.

Aimed at the general reader with at least some basic knowledge of music, I found the monograph absorbing and readable.

It falls naturally into three parts. In the first, Hart discusses the relevant music customs of the era during which the concertini were written, including the opera seria, its two major librettists, and the importance in the operas of the aria and the duetto that led to the emergence of the duetto notturno, of which the concertini are a prime example.

The second part concentrates on the concertini, their composer, the three existing manuscripts and their provenance, and includes a concise analysis of their musical value. The final part focuses on the text of each of the twenty concertini but incorporates the incipit of each and a brief reference to the musical setting.

The monograph’s defects, mainly due to the proof-reading, do not detract from the merits of a meticulously researched work whose prime achievement is the replacing of a forgotten composer in the era in which he worked and persuades that he still merits the attention of the contemporary musician and the public.

For more information, visit www.monsignor-reggio.com/Concertini-book.html.