^{BY PABLO DEVIGO | FIRST PUBLISHED 21 SEP 2025}

Still Life is the debut album of Música d’Outrora, directed by Pablo Devigo. Recorded in Birmingham in 2024 and released on the British label Deux-Elles 19 September 2025, it explores the radical expressivity of the 17th-century ‘stylus phantasticus’. The recording project was supported by Continuo Foundation and Angel Early Music.

(Amore): ‘Arderò, ferirò: stragi funeste
Farò di ogni mortale: altri arme,
Altra rabbia, altri fulmini, altro foco
Vedrai nel regno mio, fabbro inesperto,
Incenerirì i più superbi cuori.’

(Love): ‘I shall burn, I shall wound: devastating carnage
I shall wreak upon all mortals; other weapons,
Other fury, other thunderbolts, other fire
You shall see in my realm, inexperienced craftsman,
I shall reduce the proudest hearts to ashes.’

These fiery lines from Giulio Strozzi’s Il natale di amore (1621) capture the revolutionary spirit that once defined Venetian baroque aesthetics – a world where art sought to wound and transform, where composers wielded dissonance and harmony as weapons to pierce the soul. This same transformative fire burns through our new album, Still Life, guiding every interpretive decision and shaping our understanding of the stylus phantasticus.

The aesthetic framework: Time suspended

The creative concept for the album emerged from a compelling parallel between baroque still-life painting and the musical works of the early 17th century. Both art forms share a fundamental approach to time and meaning: they create carefully-arranged moments where individual elements – whether painted objects, or musical sections – gain significance through their relationships and contrasts.

At the heart of the project is the stylus phantasticus, a compositional style defined by Athanasius Kircher in his Musurgia universalis (1650) as ‘the most free and unfettered method of composition, bound to nothing’. But don’t mistake this freedom for chaos – it’s a sophisticated approach to musical time where meaning emerges through juxtaposition rather than linear development. Each section in these works functions like an object in a still life: complete in itself, yet gaining deeper significance through its placement within the whole.

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^{A mini-documentary featuring discussions about the album’s concept and recording process}

This understanding shaped our programming approach. Rather than organising works chronologically or by composer, the selection emphasised pieces that exemplified different aspects of suspended time – moments where the forward motion of music pauses to explore a single affect in its full intensity. Whether in Castello’s dramatic contrasts, Buxtehude’s sacred-secular dialogues, or Albertini’s virtuosic suspensions over pedal points, each work demonstrates how the stylus phantasticus creates these temporal ‘still lifes’.

Venetian theatricality: A radical reinterpretation

The most significant interpretive decision for this recording came through studying Dario Castello’s connection to Venetian opera. Working at San Marco under Monteverdi, Castello (1602–1631) inhabited a musical world where dramatic expression reigned supreme. This proximity suggested a radical hypothesis: applying Monteverdi’s orchestration principles from L’Orfeo to Castello’s instrumental works.

^{Dario Castello | Sonate concertate in stil moderno, Book II: Sonata No. 1 in A minor | Música d’Outrora}

In L’Orfeo, Monteverdi meticulously specifies instrumental combinations for dramatic effect. The sombre pairing of organ and theorbo underscores Orpheus’s grief; harpsichord, viola da braccio, and theorbo capture his agitated questioning; regal and chitarrone accompany Charon in the underworld. These aren’t arbitrary choices – they’re carefully calculated timbral decisions that heighten the drama.

Applying this principle to Castello’s sonatas, Música d’Outrora employed the full continuo palette found in Monteverdi’s opera: organ, harpsichord, theorbo, guitar, lirone, and violone. Each timbral shift marks a new emotional terrain, transforming these works from abstract instrumental pieces into dramatic scenes without words. While this approach departs from traditional performance practice, it reveals the theatrical imagination that lies at the heart of Venetian baroque music.

Light and Shadow: The aesthetic of contrast

The principle of chiaroscuro – fundamental to baroque visual arts – finds perfect musical expression in Still Life. Just as painters like Caravaggio and Georges de La Tour used dramatic light-dark contrasts to create emotional depth, these composers employed sudden juxtapositions to heighten affective power.

In Buxtehude's Sonata VI in D minor, this duality emerges through instrumental choices. The harpsichord’s bright articulation illuminates the worldly dance sections, while the chamber organ’s sustained tones carry the weight of devotional passages. This isn’t mere variety – it’s a musical theology where sacred and secular exist in productive tension.

Alessandro Stradella’s Sinfonia a tre offered different possibilities. Here, the organ doubles the strict polyphonic sections, evoking the stile antico of sacred music. These passages alternate with guitar-dominated dances (performed by Louis Moisan) that bring the street into the church – a reflection of 17th-century Italy’s complex cultural landscape under Spanish influence.

^{Buxtehude | Trio Sonata in D minor, Op. 1 No. 6, BuxWV 257 | Música d’Outrora}

Virtuosity as transcendence

Not all risks in Still Life are about instrumentation. Ignazio Albertini’s Violin Sonatas posed unique interpretive challenges. His technique of creating extended pedal points where harmony freezes while the violin explores increasingly virtuosic figurations suggests a musical representation of mystical experience – the soul’s flight while the body remains earthbound.

Working with violinist Christi Park, we sought to emphasise these moments of suspension not as technical display, but as spiritual expression. Each ascending passage over static harmony becomes a prayer, each descent a return to earthly consciousness. This understanding transforms virtuosity from mere technical achievement into a vehicle for transcendence.

^{Albertini | Sonata No. 10 in E minor (from the ‘12 Violin Sonatas’) | Música d’Outrora}

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^{Excerpt from recording sessions for Still Life: Finale of Stradella’s Sinfonia a tre | Música d’Outrora}

The album culminates with Gregorio Strozzi’s rarely performed ‘Ancidetemi pur,’ based on Jacques Arcadelt’s Renaissance madrigal – a work that captured the imagination of generations of baroque composers. The original text embodies the Petrarchan paradox of love as sweet torment:

‘Ancidetemi pur gravi martiri / Che'l viver mi sia noia / Che'l morir mi fia gioia’

‘Kill me then, grievous torments / For living is but trouble to me / And dying would be joy’

This embrace of love’s annihilation – finding joy in death for love’s sake – resonated deeply with baroque sensibilities. Like Giulio Strozzi’s Love who promises to ‘reduce the proudest hearts to ashes,’ Arcadelt’s protagonist welcomes destruction as the ultimate expression of devotion.

This emotionally charged text inspired a remarkable Neapolitan tradition of instrumental elaborations. Composers including Girolamo Frescobaldi, Giovanni Girolamo Kapsberger, and Giovanni Maria Trabaci all created their own transformations of Arcadelt’s madrigal, establishing a sophisticated practice of variation and elaboration that became central to keyboard repertoire in southern Italy.

Gregorio Strozzi’s contribution to this tradition stands as perhaps the most ambitious, yet it remains largely unknown in modern performance and recording. His keyboard writing demands both technical precision and improvisatory freedom – rapid passagework that evokes the ‘grievous torments’, suspended harmonies that capture the longing for release, and ornamental figurations that transform Arcadelt’s vocal lines into purely instrumental rhetoric. Each variation becomes a meditation on a different aspect of love’s paradox: now pleading, now resigned, now ecstatic in its embrace of annihilation. Strozzi’s treatment epitomises the stylus phantasticus – taking existing material and transforming it through the fire of imagination into something entirely new, yet eternally connected to its source.

The fire that transforms

In Still Life, we seek to reignite the transformative fire that Giulio Strozzi invoked – where music doesn't merely entertain, but wounds, transforms, and elevates. The stylus phantasticus provides the key: it’s not just a historical style, but a philosophy of musical time and expression that remains urgently relevant.

Each work on Still Life represents a different path toward this transformation. Together, they create a sonic gallery where time suspends, where each moment stands in stark relief against the next, where the careful arrangement of contrasts generates meaning beyond the sum of parts.

This transformation – from physical sensation to spiritual understanding – lies at the heart of 17th-century aesthetics. Giulio Strozzi captures this journey in the conclusion to Il natale di amore:

‘L'intelletto divino
Fà che l'huom tutto spiri,
Tutto seco il rapisce:
Né per viltà de' sensi
Troppo in terra il ritiene:
Ond'è che tutto inteso
A contemplar bellezza,
Tutto spirto diviene.’

‘Divine intellect
Makes man all spirit,
Takes him all with itself:
Not through the baseness of senses
Does it keep him too much on earth:
Hence he who is entirely intent
On contemplating beauty,
Becomes all spirit.’

These lines illuminate the ultimate goal of the stylus phantasticus: through the contemplation of beauty – whether in Albertini's soaring violin lines, Castello’s dramatic contrasts, or Strozzi’s meditative variations – the listener transcends earthly limitations. The ‘baseness of senses’ becomes the very vehicle for spiritual elevation, as carefully crafted sensory experience leads to divine understanding.

This is the aesthetic vision that guided every decision, from programming to performance to the final mix in Ignasi Cambra’s masterful production. In performing these works today, Música d’Outrora seeks not archaeological reconstruction, but living transformation – to become, through beauty, tutto spirito.

‘Still Life: Early Baroque Fantasy’ by Música d’Outrora was released on Deux-Elles Records on 19 September 2025.

_{Recording Credits: Christi Park, violin • Timothy Lin, viola da gamba and cello • Claas Harders, lirone • Dávid Budai, violone • Asako Ueda, theorbo and archlute • Louis Moisan, guitar • Pablo Devigo, chamber organ and harpsichord.
Produced by Ignasi Cambra & Pablo Devigo • Recording Engineer: Ignasi Cambra • Recording Assistant: Nicholas Thomas Akey • Recorded July-August 2024 at St. Alban's Church, Birmingham, UK • Supported by Angel Early Music and Continuo Foundation}