Barbetta: Lute Music

Including many world-premiere recordings, the first-ever album dedicated to the music of a 16th-century lutenist-composer from Padova: a sequence of virtuosic, restlessly inventive fantasias and dances.

The music on this album is drawn from a 1582 collection, Novae tabulae musicae testudinariae hexachordae et heptachordae. The frontispiece shows a figure, likely Barbetta himself, casting a broken lute into the fire, beneath which reads a defiant inscription: 'I shall never willingly entrust the lute to the ignorant or the envious, but to one born of flame shall I commit it - for neither ignorance nor envy shall ever be able to achieve what he can.'

Beyond the collection itself, little is known about its author, Cecilio Cesare Barbetta (c.1540-c.1623). Living and working in the university city of Padova, Barbetta was evidently exposed to German cultural models through the members of the German nobility who passed through the city. Many of his 14 Fantasias are intricate four-part contrapuntal works, requiring both technical mastery and a deep understanding of musical structure from the performer. By contrast, Barbetta also wrote (or elaborated) not only traditional Italian dances like the Saltarello, but also pieces with exotic character, such as the Moresca, a traditional Moorish dance from North Africa.

This album has been a labour of love for the Japanese lutenist Mikiya Kaisho, whose booklet essay details his work in transcribing Barbetta's music from facsimiles of the original tablatures. 'My hope was to craft a musical narrative,' he writes, 'carefully designed to allow anyone to enjoy the lute's delicate and intimate resonance in daily life, on a journey through a vibrant and multifaceted sound world.'

Born in 1991 in Osaka, Mikiya Kaisho studied in Vienna and Frankfurt, before taking first prize at the Maurizio Pratola International Early Music Competition in Italy. A tour of Japan in 2024 centred on the life and music of John Dowland, and he is now numbered among the most prominent early-music performers in his native country