History – including that of music – usually has little love and attention for figures from in-between worlds, such as the Italian violinist and composer Domenico Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi Mealli (1624- around 1687). He found himself in a twilight zone between the heydays of Northern Italian and Austrian violin music in the seventeenth century.
Mealli worked in Venice and at courts in Innsbruck, Messina and Madrid. And we don’t know much more about him. Two works of violin pieces from 1660 – published in Innsbruck – have survived. This Opus three and four speaks and sings and seems to tell stories in the hands of the Dutch-Swiss baroque violinist Eva Saladin and her company.
The twelve sonatas all bear titles, although these do not say much about the content, writes Saladin. La Cesta (the basket), La Clemente (the benevolent) or La Stella (the star) would mainly refer to Mealli’s fellow musicians in the court orchestra of Archduke Ferdinand Karel of Tyrol in Innsbruck. A rather cruel and dissolute monarch with little heart for his political opponents, but for music.
Saladin has devoted himself with great love and attention to Mealli’s art and the changing composition of the accompanying ensemble. Her violin grows into a character. In La Monella Romanesca (The Roman brat) she sometimes involuntarily reminds you of the petite and boastful god of love Amor in Claudio Monteverdi’s opera L’incoronazione di Poppea. In many sonatas the violin becomes a kind of human voice, telling stories in a mysterious secret language, the details of which we do not learn, but we do experience the intoxication.
2023-06-09 15:37:02
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