The front cover image of Accent's Ferrandini: Cantate per passione is rather arresting, Mary Magdalene, tortured by suffering in a fifteenth century sculpture "The Mourning for Christ" by Guido Mazzoni. Too bad the music inside isn't as compelling. Giovanni Battista Ferrandini was a court composer in Munich who worked alongside Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco. After the latter began to cut back on his responsibilities owing to ill health, Ferrandini took over the mantle of chamber music director; he also composed a number of operas for the theater in Munich and numerous cantatas, including the two featured here. Feeling written out by 1753, Ferrandini was offered a pension and resettled in Padua, though by the very end of his long life, Ferrandini was back in Munich. Born the same year as Thomas Arne and Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Ferrandini died just three months before Mozart.
Although a so-called classical-era composer, Ferrandini's work demonstrates an inexact grasp of the style galant; his undated, stormy G minor string quartet, played here by a string ensemble drawn from the period group
Echo du Danube, sounds like lesser Vivaldi owing to its lack of variety -- sequence follows sequence upon sequence. The Flute Concerto in F is even weaker, its listless continuo plodding along as the flute reaps all of the glory -- the ripieno is so weak that one wonders if there is something wrong with the recording, but no, it's the score.
One might wonder why the subject of concertos and string quartets is coming up in such context anyway; isn't this disc titled Cantate per passione? Indeed, two passion cantatas, O spettacolo pur troppo funesto and Ecco quel tronco are included. Soprano
Elisabeth Scholl works hard to squeeze out every emotive drop possible in these rather bland and faceless cantatas, and while her effort is a valiant one, she cannot save them. Between the two, only the Lento assai of O spettacolo pur troppo funesto suggests that Christ's passion was something more serious than what might be appropriately treated with a Band Aid. This aria does contain some strikingly sour dissonances in the instrumental complement, though it is hard to tell if this is intentional or merely the result of indifferent part writing. The only work on the disc that demonstrates that Ferrandini was worth his salt is the German-language arietta "Liebste Mutter voll der Schmerzen"; that alone has some depth, appealing harmonic color, and illustrates its subject -- a grieving Mary waiting at the entrance to Christ's tomb -- with some sense of immediacy. The rest of the vocal music sounds like mediocre opera from the middle of the eighteenth century;
Echo du Danube, it appears, needed to dig a little deeper into the well of Ferrandini to bring up a little water, indeed, if truly any there is to be found.