Basic organ accompaniment to a Baroque aria is often rather low-hanging fruit — except that Care Selve is in practice to be sung with so much temporal liberty that it becomes a great test of the accompanist.

I decided to record the accompaniment first, this time, simply imagining how I would sing it: a rather difficult thing to do, but for a relatively short piece somewhat achieveable most of the time.

For me, the definitive recording — at least vocally, ignoring the ridiculous vibrato in the cello basso continuo, and the slightly annoyingly high-pitched harpsichord — is Richard Conrad’s on “The Art of Bel Canto”. Of course, my voice is a world apart from his and nothing in my recordings even begins to resemble bel canto (not for lack of trying), but that’s where the little descending scale at the end comes from.

This is a surprisingly and frustratingly difficult piece to sing, considering its short duration, leisurely tempo, and simple text. A big barrier for me is that F3 is right in my passaggio.

Take 42 was a very good one, but ruined by an artificial-sounding click somewhere in the chain. Take 46 was ultimately taken as the final, despite some discrepancy in timing with the organ.

Registration

Friesach by Piotr Grabowski, as has become my habit.

A very simple registration for a very simple piece.

It was tempting to play the lower line on the pedals — this would have made chord shapes much more comfortable, and removed any occasions of finger-matching between hands — but pedals were not really the norm on English organs of the 18th century and so it would have been a bit anachronistic, not just in sound (if I’d used any pedal stops) but also in rhythm: playing this only on manuals necessitates a slightly bouncier articulation because of the fingering, whereas having the aide of pedals would have inclined me more to a legato interpretation.

The result of playing basso continuo on the manuals only, combined with the range of a bass voice, is a rather narrow pitch range in the overall recording which is arguably historically inaccurate: Meleagro was written to be sung by a soprano castrato, in the treble range. That would be a point in favour of using the pedals, or perhaps using a 16’ stop on the manuals to preserve articulation and historically informed performance: shifting both instruments and voice down in pitch whilst maintaining the ratio between them.

I was somewhat stuck between using the Rohrflöte 8’ and the Gedackt 8’: the former is slightly piercing, but the latter just doesn’t have any penetrating power at all and so in my opinion would have to be accompanied by harpsichord (or lute!) at minimum.

• Manual I
  • Rohrflöte 8'

Take notes

• Voice: Up to take 8, in sync with organ take 6. Take 9 onwards is freestyle from scaffolding with the intention of re-recording organ after the fact.
• Voice Take 15 is acceptable in interpretation, but not in intonation (slightly off vs. organ). It can serve as a scaffolding for organ take 9 onwards.