I Bononcini. Da Modena all'Europa (1666-1747) Visualizza ingrandito

The Violoncello of the Bononcini Brothers

Autore Marc Vanscheeuwijck
Curatela Marc Vanscheeuwijck
Collana Studi e Saggi
N. 31
Dimensioni 17×24, pp. XIX+372
Anno 2020
ISBN 9788855430272

Prezzo 7,00 €

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What was the violoncello of Giovanni and Antonio Maria Bononcini, and how did they play it? Though these may seem to be absurd questions, they are not. Recent studies have shown that at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries the “violoncello” was not a univocal term, and the “violone” was also part of the family of bass violins. Moreover, in the iconography of the time we see various ways of holding both the instrument and the bow. In the Bolognese tradition as elsewhere, there was a great variety of instruments and of ways of playing them in the Bononcini brothers’ day.
This essay aims to discover, based on archival documents, iconography, treatises, and the music itself, what kind (or kinds) of violoncello the Bononcinis, as soloists famous throughout Europe, could have used. In the case of Giovanni, we have only three sonatas for violoncello with basso continuo, and a few arias with obbligato violoncello; in the case of Antonio Maria, by contrast, about fifteen sonatas survive which feature a very particular compositional style, one which could give us indications on how some Bolognese virtuosos realized the basso continuo on the cello.

Marc Vanscheeuwijck (1962) is a Belgian baroque cellist and a professor of musicology at the University of Oregon, where he has been chair of Musicology & Ethnomusicology from 2007 to 2019. He teaches music history courses in the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods, Performance Practice, Baroque Cello, and he co-directs the Collegium Musicum ensemble, which specializes in early music. His research focuses on late seventeenth-century music in Bologna and on the history and repertoire of cellos and bass violins. He has written several articles for Performance Practice Review, Early Music, and elsewhere, and he has published various critical facsimiles of Bolognese seventeenth-century cello music. His first book titled The Cappella Musicale of San Petronio in Bologna under Giovanni Paolo Colonna (1674–1695): History-Organization-Repertoire was published in 2003. In 2015 he co-edited with Guido Olivieri a volume of studies on Corelli, titled Arcomelo 2013 (Lucca: LIM, 2015), and he authored a book with 5 CDs with Bruno Cocset and les Basses Réunies, Cello Stories. The Cello in the 17th and 18th Centuries for Outhere (Alpha 890) in Paris (2016). As a Baroque cellist and conductor he regularly performs throughout Europe and in the USA, and he teaches seminars and master classes on historical performance practices everywhere in Europe.
<marcovan@uoregon.edu>