These two recordings by the Dutch bass Max van Egmond explore a wide range of Italian motets and arias, as well as some instrumental music, from the early Baroque. However, there is very little overlap between the two; indeed, they have, partly through choice of repertory and partly through manner of performance, turned out to be quite different animals.
Probably the most successful is that entitled ''Motetti ed Arie a Basso Solo'' on the Ricercar label. Solo vocal music from seventeenth-century Italy, by composers such as Caccini, Monteverdi and Carissimi, is more often than not associated with the high voice, male or female; here van Egmond presents an essentially chronological survey of the less familiar, though equally varied and appealing, repertory for the bass voice. The selection concentrates on sacred music in Latin and the vernacular, with a variety of texts from Marian laments to Christmas music to dramatic Old Testament-style narratives, and thus affords plenty of contrast. Francesca Caccini's Christmassy O che nuovo stupor has a delightful instrumental refrain (well played by the accompanying instrumentalists, the Ricercar Consort), while Cazzati's Lamento di Maria and Brevi's Catenae terranae share a sensuousness of vocal line common to many such settings of the time when it came to either the sweetness or the sadness of the Virgin Mary.
Van Egmond's voice is perhaps best suited to the more dramatic numbers such as Cazzati's Factum est praelium magnum (which describes Lucifer's fall from heaven) where its rather grainy quality and instrumental dexterity—common characteristics of the 'early music' bass—can be more effective than in the more lyrical pieces. Here he characterizes convincingly such phrases as ''confuso gemitu ululabante dicentes'' and relishes the wide-ranging flourishes on individual words such as ''pugnavere'' and ''fugiamus''.
Sensitive to every nuance of the text, van Egmond is not afraid to take risks with his vocal technique in pursuit of projecting the emotions behind the words—true to an approach Caccini and his followers would have approved. Yet, a little further into the seventeenth century and things were already beginning to shift in the direction of more purely musical concerns in terms of structure and melodic line, and, perhaps for this reason the later pieces are here less successfully served, van Egmond seeming less at home with the Marcello cantata on this recording and the Frescobaldi arias that form the focal point of the second disc for Etcetera.
This is rather less clearly conceived: entitled ''Amarilli, mia bella'' after Caccini's famous song it combines sacred and secular rather unconvincingly and explores quite fully the contemporary keyboard idiom. (The Storace has the feel of a filler, though at six-and-a-half minutes it is the single longest item on the recording.) The Frescobaldi group alternates shortish, lighter-weight arias with relatively substantial keyboard pieces perfectly well played by the harpsichordist Chris Farr. I rather doubt whether such a combination of pieces reflects any original mode of performance, and any sense of flow within the group is disturbed by the fact that the harpsichord is much more closely miked in the solo items than when it fulfils an accompanying role. Still, van Egmond's essentially light voice (at the top of his range it can have a pleasing tenorish quality) and attention to detail lend an appropriate easy grace or sprezzatura to the vocal items, especially in the Caccini group and to Frescobaldi's Cosi mi disprezzate.'