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Giovanni Battista Grillo (d. Venice, 1622)

Complete Instrumental Music and Selected Motets

Giovanni Battista Grillo is one of several excellent composers active in Venice in the early seventeenth century whose reputation has been somewhat overshadowed by that of Giovanni Gabrieli. Grillo is granted just two short paragraphs in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and none of his vocal music has been available in modern edition until now. Rediscovering this neglected composer through the process of editing, rehearsing, performing and recording his music has been an exciting and joyful experience, each step leading to the revelation of the work of a true master. We hope, therefore, that this recording will do something to improve Grillo’s standing in the seventeenth-century musical canon. But most of all, we simply wish to share with you, the listener, some of Grillo’s most beautiful music. We hope you will feel something of the thrill on first hearing these pieces that we did on first playing them!

Details of Grillo’s early career are sketchy. We first hear of him as a contributor to Costantino Baselli’s anthology, Secondo libro delle canzonette a tre voci (Venice, 1600), and, according to contemporary sources, he may have spent some time in the Austrian court at Graz in the early 1600s. Three of Grillo’s instrumental pieces were printed in Alessandro Raverii’s anthology of canzonas by ‘diversi eccellentissimi musici’ in 1608, and it is possible that he was in Venice playing the organ on a freelance basis in the same year.

However, nothing definite is known about Grillo’s employment until August 1612 when he was elected organist at the Scuola Grande di San Rocco (directly succeeding Giovanni Gabrieli, and beating off stiff competition from Giovanni Picchi for the post). He evidently continued to seek employment elsewhere following this appointment, as he sent manuscripts of some of his compositions to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria in 1613. This seems to have been an unsuccessful bid for the position of Hofkapellmeister in Graz (the successful candidate was another Venetian, Giovanni Priuli). Nevertheless, Grillo’s compositions were well received: Matthia Ferrabosco, the deputy Kapellmeister, appraised them as ‘very lovely to perform in concert, with voices and especially with sundry instruments’.

So Grillo remained in Venice, and in 1615 took a second job as organist at the church of the Madonna dell’Orto (without relinquishing his position at the Scuola di San Rocco, which he held for the rest of his life). He also continued to accept freelance employment: he was engaged as a third, additional, organist at San Marco on major feast days in 1615 and 1617, playing on these occasions under the direction of the basilica’s new maestro di cappella, Claudio Monteverdi.

There is just one contemporary collection dedicated exclusively to Grillo’s music: Sacri concentus ac symphoniae, printed in Venice by Bartolomeo Magni in 1618 (and, interestingly, dedicated to Archduke Ferdinand of Austria). Its publication was timely: it would surely have bolstered Grillo’s reputation, preparing the way for his appointment to the coveted position of first organist at San Marco on 30 December 1619. It is perhaps worth remembering that Giovanni Gabrieli himself was only ever second organist! Grillo held this position for just three years, for, according to one of Monteverdi’s letters, he died in mid-November 1622. It is not known how old he was at his death, but it is tempting to postulate, based on the date of publication of Baselli’s anthology, that he may have been forty-something. He was at the height of his career as an organist, and it is a tribute to his standing as a composer that, along with Monteverdi, he was one of the composers specially commissioned to contribute music to the Requiem Mass of Cosimo II de’ Medici in 1621. The music for this occasion is unfortunately lost.

Tantalisingly, at the end of his life, Grillo had just started to explore the possibilities of small-scale music in the most modern compositional styles. His beautiful and expressive pieces for two voices and basso continuo in Lorenzo Calvi’s anthologies of 1621 (Quam pulchri sunt [11] and Obstupescite [15]) and 1624 (Dic mihi [6]) perhaps reflect the influence of Alessandro Grandi, the great master of small-scale vocal writing, who became vice maestro di cappella at San Marco in November 1620. Also from the posthumous 1624 anthology is Anima mea [5], scored for four sopranos and continuo. In this setting the text is only complete in the first soprano part, which we have interpreted as an invitation to substitute cornetts for the remaining voices. Similarly, following the advice of Michael Praetorius in Syntagma musicum (1619), we have substituted instruments for voices in the larger-scale vocal pieces, always ensuring the text is sung in at least one part.

Grillo’s collection of 1618, Sacri concentus, demonstrates an interesting mixture of styles. On the one hand many of the pieces are clearly indebted to the old-style cori spezzati (polychoral, literally ‘broken choir’) legacy of Giovanni Gabrieli, such as the eight-voice motets for high and low choirs, Ad te levavi [2] and Misericordias [19]. On the other hand, there are several forward-looking pieces in the collection, such as O saluratis hostia [17], which seem more to suggest the influence of Monteverdi. These pieces are in concertato style, in which sections for solo voices and basso continuo alternate with passages for tutti voices.

The meeting of old and new styles is perhaps most evident in Sonata prima [1], in which Grillo pays homage to two of the greatest composers of the sixteenth century by quoting Palestrina’s Vestiva i colli and Lassus’s Susanne un jour. A close analysis of the six-voice motet Levavi oculos meos [9] suggests that it too draws on a number of melodic and harmonic ideas from Susanne un jour, in what may be regarded as a loose paraphrase of Lassus’s chanson. The quotations in Sonata prima are contrasted with passages that polarise treble and bass instruments in the new concertato style. There are similar concertato passages in Sonata seconda [18], Canzon secunda [8] and Canzon terza [14], sometimes with virtuoso figuration for the first and second cornetts.

Whereas the two sonatas are scored for a single choir of seven instruments, Grillo demonstrates his mastery of the Venetian cori spezzati idiom in the eight-part canzonas. The opposition of high and low instrumental choirs in Canzon prima [3], Canzon secunda [8] and Canzon terza [14], may be compared with the disposition of voices in the eight-voice motets. In contrast, Canzon quarta [16] is written for two choirs of equal instruments. We play it a fourth below its notated pitch, following the contemporary convention of chiavette (or ‘transposing clefs’).

Canzon in ecco [4] is essentially a four-part piece, with a second choir of equal instruments literally echoing the cadence points. Canzon pian e forte [12] is a rather more sophisticated composition, with each of the choirs taking turns at imitating and echoing the other in piano passages. This piece calls to mind Giovanni Gabrieli’s famous sonata of the same title in Sacrae symphoniae (1597), although Grillo’s canzona has a livelier, more frivolous character than Gabrieli’s stately and somewhat solemn model.

Grillo’s earliest surviving instrumental pieces are three four-part canzonas in Raverii’s anthology of 1608. We have chosen to record only one of these, Canzon quintadecima [10], on four wind instruments, and we have instead transcribed Canzon quartadecima [13] and Canzon sestadecima [7] for organ solo. It was a common practice to transcribe both vocal and instrumental ensemble music for keyboard solo at this time, and all three of these pieces, together with many others from Raverii’s collection exist as keyboard intabulations in a manuscript in Vienna (Minoritenkonvent, Klosterbibliothek und Archiv, MS XIV.714), which was compiled between c.1624 and 1631.

Grillo’s published works are of the highest quality. Had he been a more prolific composer (or perhaps had more of his compositions survived), his posthumous reputation would doubtless have been greater. We present here Grillo’s complete instrumental music, and a selection of his motets. But there is much more vocal music in Sacri concentus that thoroughly deserves to be heard, and we hope that others will be encouraged to look more closely at the music of this neglected master. For our own part, if this recording helps to bring the enjoyment and appreciation of Grillo’s music to a wider audience, then our job will be well done.

Jamie Savan, Artistic Director

June 2007