Musica d’Outrora: Still Life
St Cecilia’s Hall 27/6/26
The Sypert Summer Concert Series 2026
Still Life - Early Baroque Fantasy
Musica d’Outrora
I was intrigued by the publicity for this concert as part of the Sypert Summer Series, indicating a fresh and innovative look at music from the early baroque period, performed by Musica d’Outrora. Their director, the Galician keyboard player, Pablo Devigo, has devised a programme of apparently unrelated music by composers from all over Europe, influenced by the amusingly named Stilus Phantasticus, a movement which was extremely popular in the 17th century, in which later ideas of strict compositional orthodoxy are completely disregarded. Music was going through an enormous change at this time. From Polyphony and Renaissance ideas, a new style was emerging, contemporaneous with the appearance for the first time of the embryonic form, Opera, which was sweeping Italy and soon would conquer the world. As someone who has spent his career singing opera and baroque music, I find this transitional period fascinating, and tonight’s concert was hugely entertaining and informative. Not a singer was to be seen, but the human voice was fluttering in the air all evening.
Musica d’Outrora consists of Conor Gricmanis (violin), Pablo Devigo (harpsichord and chamber organ), Louis Moisan (baroque guitar and theorbo), Timothy Lin (viola da gamba) and Chun-Yuan Yang (lirone). This last instrument was most interesting, a sort of early bass, with up to 16 strings, which the player holds between his legs. Invented in 1505 by Atalante Migliorotti, apparently a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci, it flourished for a time, and then was overshadowed by more easily played instruments, and fell into obscurity, only appearing in the second half of the 20th century with the early music renaissance which swept the world. It appeared, and I must go off and listen, on Kate Bush’s 1980 song, ‘The Infant Kiss.’ Since it has so many strings, the player mostly plays three to five of them simultaneously, thus giving a warm, ethereally shimmering sound. It does sound gorgeous, and the many early music experts in the audience were terribly excited!
The concert was described in the programme thus: ‘The title ‘Still Life’ suggests not immobility but concentration – each piece appears like an object in sharp relief, defined by colour, texture, shadow and expressive change. Together, these works form a sequence of vivid musical tableaux – a world in which music argues, laments, dances, sings and transforms before us.’ Now, I would normally run a mile at such verbiage, but here the description is actually quite accurate, and it does describe what we heard to a great extent. The pieces on the whole melted into each other seamlessly, and their very lack of conventional structure was revealed as structured in an entirely different way.
The group began and ended with two sonatas from a collection, ‘Sonate Concertate in Stilo Moderno’ by Dario Castello, which was published in 1629 in Venice. Castello was a violinist, playing under Monteverdi’s direction in St Mark’s Basilica in Venice, and his compositions show the influence of his master but also a quirky individualism which was brought out in this performance, with Conor’s violin very much to the fore. Astonishing contrasts of mood occur frequently throughout the sonata, and it ended with an absolute question mark, and no sense of resolution. Castello died of the plague in Venice aged only about 30, so we were deprived of a quite unique musical voice too early.
The group of sonatas published by Castello were called ‘in the modern style’ and Conor made a fascinating point in his introduction to the second half by reminding us that what we know now as the Baroque period of music was, of course, known as modern or contemporary to musicians of the time. No one in 1629 had any idea what baroque music might be, and the astonishing inventions and creations of the composers of that period were forging ahead, as they saw it, into new and extraordinary realms. Everything was fluid and changeable and everything was new. Consequently, this concert showed us how composers of the time, often hundreds of miles apart, were searching for both novelty and precision at the same time.
The second piece was perhaps my favourite, Sonata Quarta in D Major, by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, published in Nürnberg in 1664, a fabulous mixture of slow and fast music, with virtuosic violin again taking the lead.
Pablo Devigo played a solo harpsichord toccata by Gregorio Strozzi (no relative of Barbara apparently) that could easily have been an experimental work from the 1950s, largely contemplative and meandering, alternating phrases that I could play with two fingers and then zooming off in a whirlwind of notes, and this morphed easily into a piece for Lirone and Theorbo by Kapsberger from 1604.
As if to tease us even more by the bewildering mixture of styles, we heard Gaspar Sanz’s ‘Jácaras’, featuring the Spanish guitar of Louis Moisan. Sanz was a guitarist, composer, priest and academic, who wrote three volumes of pedagogical works for baroque guitar. ‘Jácaras’ comes from his second volume, published in Zaragoza in 1675, and took us breathlessly to the high plains of Spain, where rhythmical vigour vied with melodic skill to produce a really catchy piece. Stradella’s Sinfonia a Tre finished the first half with a bang, and sent us off to interval drinks fascinated and full of questions.
The second half followed a similar pattern of no pattern, as the group delighted us with some superb playing. I was particularly taken with the piece, ‘Non ha’l ciel cotanti lumi’ by Giulio Caccini, from 1614. Caccini was a prominent singer and composer at the turn of the century, hugely influential in the shift from polyphony to monody, where a voice or an instrument is accompanied by a bass grouping, a forerunner of the operatic recitative, beloved of Mozart. Here, again, although no singer was involved, the simplicity of the style suggested an accompanied voice, and its very unpredictability made the piece all the more fascinating.
Musica d’Outrora ended their concert with Castello’s second sonata in stile moderno, and were loudly applauded by a decent, if not young, audience in St Cecilia’s. I really don’t know why early music in Scotland seems such a hard sell to a young audience. When I performed with ensembles such as The English Concert or Les Musiciens du Louvre in continental Europe, the audiences were full of inspired young people. Why not here? Anyway, we were delighted by a beautiful rendition of Burns’ ‘My Love is like a red, red Rose’ as an encore, on early instruments - Conor’s violin is a Gagliano, dating from 1700 and the harpsichord from the Russell Collection (a Trasuntinus dating from 1574 in Venice, made before any of tonight’s music was written) – and modern copies of old instruments.
The concert was supported through the generosity of George and Joy Sypert.