Live happily — an imperative everyone would gladly obey, and yet happiness, the two musicians write in the booklet, seems to be a very independent and roving mistress. Buoyant moments of dancing, enjoying and celebrating are in any case often bound up with music that carries that atmosphere within it like an essence. In the Mediterranean above all, the models of passionate dances and folk melodies have flowed into art music in every age — and in the case of the famous Follia have spread across the world. Music that carries this sense of life, or that rests on themes rooted in the folk and dance music of Spain, Italy and Dalmatia, makes up the greater part of the programme.
Three versions of the Follia stand side by side: Bernardo Pasquini’s buoyant Partite sopra la Aria della Follia da Espagna, originally for harpsichord, in which nothing of the later readings is yet to be felt; Alessandro Scarlatti’s highly imaginative Variazioni sulla Follia di Spagna; and Arcangelo Corelli’s La Follia, by now a classic of the recorder repertoire although it was originally composed for the violin and printed in the violin sonatas Op. 5 — its extensive variations exhaust all the possibilities of the baroque violin, down to broken chords and double stops.
The art of ornamentation is the second theme. Improvisations and “cover versions” of the hits of the sixteenth century often gave rise to independent works that show the model in a new light — such as Francesco Rognoni’s diminution on Palestrina’s madrigal Vestiva i colli or Diego Ortiz’s Recercada on Sandrin’s Doulce memoire. Between Spanish and Italian ornamentation there are characteristic differences, for instance in the handling of trills and appoggiaturas, but just as many things in common. Two pieces from the fifteenth-century Codex Faenza stand next to one another and make the contrast audible: the virtuoso, secular Aquila altera and the calmer Ave Maris Stella on the Marian antiphon.
Spain is represented by the organ music of Antonio de Cabezon and Francisco Correa de Arauxo, including a Tiento de medio registro on the divided keyboard. Domenico Scarlatti belongs here too: he spent an important part of his life at the Spanish court, studied its folk music closely and worked its melodies and rhythms into his harpsichord sonatas — so that, although musical historiography counts him among the Italian high baroque, he may fairly be called a Spanish composer. Gian Paolo Cima’s Sonata in D minor is one of the earliest known instrumental sonatas of the beginning seventeenth century.
A special treat are the frottole of Andrea Antico da Montona, born around 1470 in Montona in Istria. Around 1500 the term denoted vocal pieces on secular texts, mostly cheerful love poems, built simply in two parts and often using repeated notes — and conceivable in many versions, with several singers, mixed, or, as here, purely instrumental; the organ’s regal stop recalls the reed stops and double-reed instruments of the Renaissance. Jeremias Schwarzer, born in 1969 and, since winning two first prizes at the International Recorder Competition in Calw in 1992, one of the leading recorder players of his generation, has worked closely with the harpsichordist Egon Mihajlovic since 1992; in 1999 he founded the baroque ensemble Vivi Felice. The recording was made from 12 to 15 June 2001 in the Protestant Lutheran church of St George in Wendelstein; the CD runs to 58:32.