Interview, Bojan Čičić on La Notte

Featuring music by Vivaldi, Biber, Vejvanovsky, Schmelzer and Rauch, Croatian violinist Bojan Čičić's collection of 'Concertos and Pastorales for Christmas Night' on Delphian proved one of our best-sellers during the pre-Christmas period, and is the type of album that will continue to bring a great deal of pleasure long after the decorations have been stowed away for the year.

Shortly before the holidays, Bojan met up with David and me in Leamington to discuss the pleasures and challenges involved in putting together a programme of purely instrumental seasonal music, how Christmas musical traditions differed across Europe during the Baroque period and beyond - and how a seventeenth-century Flemish painting generated the initial creative spark for the project...

KC: Where did you start with exploring the idea of a purely instrumental Christmas programme? Was there a particular work which provided the impetus?

I remember being in the Rijksmuseum a few years ago and seeing this absolutely beautiful painting of a child holding a candle that illuminates just a part of the room, where everything else is in darkness. Somehow it put me in mind of that sense of expectation around Christmas, which is also right there in a work like Vivaldi's Concerto Il riposo per il Santissimo natale, and that got me thinking about whether a Christmas programme without carols or cantatas or organ solos could work...There are so many opportunities for singers at this time of year, but why shouldn't we instrumentalists strike out on our own for a change?!

Gerrit Dou's The Night School

I started working on the idea in earnest for the York Early Music Christmas Festival in 2020 – I had Steven Devine and David Miller on board, so we put together a programme for violin, organ and theorbo. I included the Nativity Sonata from Biber’s Rosary Sonatas, Tartini’s Sonata Pastorale, and one of the Carbonelli sonatas I’d recorded for Delphian - No. 8, which is very similar to the Corelli Christmas Concerto with the pastorale depicting the shepherds at the end. I think of Corelli being a huge influence, so there were a lot of connections there. I also had an absolute monster of an anonymous sonata (possibly by Nicolaus Adam Strungk, possibly not!), which is based on the chorale Wie Schon leuchtet der Morgenstern - that appears on this CD, and the manuscript is kept in a convent in Vienna.

DS: And how did that evolve into the programme we hear on the album?

A little while after the concert I spoke to Delphian about doing something on a grander scale for a recording, and as part of the research I met up with the French Vivaldi expert Olivier Fourès. Olivier was instrumental in making the complete edition of instrumental works by Vivaldi that was published in Madrid; if fragments existed, he tried to recompose or reconstruct them, and one of those is the Christmas Concerto which gets its world premiere recording on our album. Then I came across an early version of ‘La Notte’, which we all know as a flute concerto by Vivaldi, but this manuscript says ‘per flauto ó violino’. I actually prefer it on the violin, but of course I would say that!

Then I started fitting the puzzle-pieces together; Wie Schon leuchtet der Morgenstern would have to be there, but I couldn’t re-record the Carbonelli and there was no point in recording the Biber in isolation from the other Rosary Sonatas...So I got in touch with the musicologist Robert Rawson, who’d written an article on Christmas pastorellas and pastourelles coming from Central Europe: it’s a big tradition there, and in the article he explored sonatas by Vejvanovsky, Biber and Schmelzer that had connections with folk songs which were also sung in Latin in church-services at Christmas.

For example, Biber’s ‘La Pastorella’ Sonata opens with a theme that has words in Latin, but originally comes from the Bohemian-Moravia folk tradition. And in the Resurrection Sonata from the Rosary Sonatas, there’s a theme that comes from the hymn 'Parvule, pupule' that’s used during or just after Easter in Croatian churches, with words in Croatian rather than in Latin. ( I didn’t know it because I didn’t go to church, but a friend of mine who’s an organist recognised it when I played it!).

KC: And is the general consensus that at least some of these instrumental works would have been used liturgically?

Absolutely, in the same way that Handel performed orchestral concertos in between the acts of his oratorios: music in churches was there to inspire awe and wonder. The Vejvanovsky Sonata laetitia has a loose connection to Christmas, because it was written for one of the Marian feasts - there would’ve been I think five or six across the liturgical year, and one of them’s quite close to Christmas so you could definitely repurpose it!

KC: How much new repertoire did you discover along the way?

Robert’s article also mentioned Gottfried Finger’s sonata for three viols (again with a pastorale movement); I thought it would be a nice change to break up the violin sound with viols on the album, but then I thought ‘If we have something for three viols, then I have to find something for three violins…’. I was very lucky to come across Rauch’s Sonata No. X 'Pastorella', which was surprisingly good – a lot of these things just come down to blind luck, ordering music from the publisher and hoping…! I think it's the first recording of the piece itself, and I do hope it will become standard repertoire for any three-violin programme. This is Sonata No. 10 out of 12, and I’d love to explore the rest - the reason the compiler of the Edition Rauch chose to include this one was the pastorale at the end.

The Vejvanovsky sonata has been recorded before, by Gunar Letzbor, but for me it was a must-have because it has two viols and two violins: having done separate pieces for each family of instruments I wanted to find something that would combine both!

DS: Isn't it quite unusual to see both families used simultaneously…?

Yes: Buxtehude occasionally would write a movement for viols followed by a movement for upper strings, but you’re right that we don’t often see them literally together. It just goes to show that musicians in the eighteenth century played everything – it was really common for flautists to play the oboe and vice versa, and for violinists to also play the viol.

KC: You mentioned that anonymous manuscript that's kept in Vienna earlier, which sounds pretty intriguing...

Yes, it's a bit of a mystery…in Vienna you’d expect to find Catholic music from Catholic composers, but this is written on the Lutheran bassigaglos, so you think ‘What’s it doing here?!’. Was it just because somebody loved the music or the composer so much that they felt the need to store it there? They have a huge library of violin music from the second half of the seventeenth century, both published and unpublished works, incorporating scordatura and all kinds of extended techniques. A lot of them are anonymous, and a lot are by composers that wouldn’t have been known otherwise.

I think there’s probably a lot of places in Italy where they didn’t digitize their library, and you’re not allowed in unless you’re a Brother or have a special permission from the abbot or whoever! I remember talking to [lutenist and musicologist] Lynda Sayce about it, when she was in Rome digitizing manuscripts for Alamire, and she was saying that there’s tonnes of material still to be discovered: the challenge is getting access in the first place, then having the equipment and time to do it!

KC: Your programme focuses specifically on Christmas musical traditions across Catholic Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries - how distinct are those from what was going on in Protestant countries at the same time?

The whole approach to pastorale in Southern and Central Europe is completely different to what it is in Northern Europe – even in the eighteenth century, people in countries like England and Holland were quite surprised when Italians would come and say ‘You’re playing this music too slowly!’. In Rome (and even further north in Italy), there was this Christmas tradition of the zampogna, where people with really loud, piercing instruments like bagpipes and drones would bust through town playing these tunes.

They’d have a manger-scene, sure, but it wouldn’t be lilting, soothing-baby-to-sleep stuff: they’d crank volume and tempo right up to the max, and it would be more like a boisterous gigue than a lullaby. I think the tradition originated in medieval or Renaissance Italy, but we still have it in Istria - often with an instrument we call sopile, which is kind of like a shawm.

DS: That approach would certainly put a different spin on something like the Pifa from Handel's Messiah!

Exactly - you can argue as to whether Handel had the idea for it from his time in Rome, so do you treat it like a Saxon composer would, or more like an Italian? If you’re Italian you know the answer to that, and if you’re English I guess you know the answer too…but somebody neutral like me has to make a decision. I’m absolutely down to perform a Messiah where someone just goes full-on Italianate and keeps it moving - especially if you do the B section and da capo it can drag, and it doesn’t have to be like that because it’s not Victorian times anymore!

KC: What are your abiding memories of Christmas in Croatia, where you grew up?

It’s very Catholic, so midnight mass was a main event – I’m not Catholic myself and I wasn’t raised Catholic, but I do remember taking part in a kind of Christmas pilgrimage as a kid. There’s a mountain called the Medvednica on top of Zagreb (a fairly small mountain, maybe 3000 feet high), and every year there would be a midnight mass (actually at 11pm!) at one of the churches along the way; regardless of religious beliefs, it was nice to go through the snow up the mountain and be there, and that painting I saw in Amsterdam captured that same sense of expectation. I hope we've expressed it in our own way on the album!