Giuseppe Colombi(1635 — 27 September 1694) – Toccatas, Tromba, Sarabanda …
Giuseppe Colombi – Sarabanda (Scordatura GDGB)
Peter Sheppard Skaerved – Violin (Maggini) Workshop recording 14 1 18
Over recent months, my fascination with Giuseppe Colombi has grown, as I have studied his extraordinary works for violin alone. Colombi was a colleague of Giovanni Battist Vitali in the ducal Capella in Modena. It seems likely to me that Vitali’s ‘Diverse partite’ were either written for Colombi, or document the two musicians shared work. Vitali was a a violone player, not a violinist, at least two of the movements in their cycles, ‘passamezzi’ and ‘Barabani’ are fundamentally the same work.
One of the real challenges of Colombi’s writing is his love of two fairly extreme re-tunings. GCEG, and GDGB. These both require some bridge shifting in order to work on a violin, and result in some lovely colours. i hear an echo of the sounds of the early 16th Century, ir earlier, as if the violin has been forced back to the world of the lira da braccia and and the citole.
