Of the Venetian Marcello brothers, Benedetto is the elder and the more original. He came from the sort of ‘nobile dilettante’ stock that also enabled his contemporary Albinoni to avoid the usual burdens of the professional musician. Marcello abandoned a full-time musical career for the law in 1707, though by the age of 21 he had already shown himself to be prolific and capable of forthright and colourful musical expression. The settings of Girolamo Giustiniani’s paraphrases of the Psalms are widely acknowledged as a distillation of Marcello’s musical achievements, as they were published in eight volumes between 1724 and 1726 and circulated to all the major musical centres of Europe. Their varied and affecting, if somewhat short-breathed, style reveals a craftsman with the means to manipulate imagery with consistent acuity.
Cantus Colln, renowned above all for their command of the dramatic energy and textural blend of the 17th-century vocal concerto, are clearly drawn to the keen characterisation and maverick contrasts of these quasi-cantatas. Portrayed by the ensemble with robust clarity in Psalm 3, David hastily departs from his rebellious son Absalom to seek solace and renewed assurance in the salvation of the Lord. David’s inner grief is skilfully unfolded as the duet’s many sections seem to serve the emotional whole, as opposed to short-term musical representation of a prevailing mood. Psalm 47 is an example of a composer determined to unsettle the listener with forceful contrapuntal bravura and outrageous chromatic shifts. Whether Marcello pushes his obsession with textual implication too far for comfort elsewhere is, however, a real concern, especially in Psalms 10 and 47, where he links arioso, recitative and madrigalian conceit with unabashed vigour. Yet the result leaves less to abstract invention or imagination (or sheer sonic pleasure) of the sort that Monteverdi and Buxtehude, to take two luminaries, revelled in with no loss of textual insight. Psalm 44 is slightly longer and the musical ideas are good enough to transcend a bludgeoning in the name of rhetorical integrity. Cantus Colln are at their alert best in this final piece. Intonation elsewhere is not quite as good as I have heard from this experienced consort.
Benedetto Marcello is an able composer, no question, though his qualities will be appreciated more by those steeped in a knowledge of early 18th-century musical fashion than speculative listeners – for whom he is unlikely to prove immediately compelling. Interesting if not indispensable.'