In the golden age of the cornetto, the instrument was praised for its unique capacity to imitate the human voice. Its clear yet flexible tone, agility and speech-like articulation made it a musical equal to the most refined singers of its time. In this refined performance titled ‘On the Breath of Angels’, cornetto expert Bruce Dickey – together with Hana Blažíková and ensemble The Breathtaking Collective – resurrected this historic ideal with convincing emotional and stylistic authenticity.
The program opened with sacred motets from the mysterious “Carlo G Manuscript” – a treasure house claimed to have been purchased at a flea market outisde Vienna 15 years ago. These intimate, devotional works offered a perfect vehicle for the central conceit of the evening: the blending of voice and cornetto as two entwined expressions of breath. Blažíková’s luminous yet soft soprano, full of subtle inflections and dynamic precision, seemed to emerge from the same breath as Dickey’s cornetto, which responded with warmth and clarity. Their dialogue recalled descriptions from the 17th century, in which the cornetto was said to “speak” with a clarity akin to sung speech.
This idea found its most intimate expression in Ascanio Trombetti’s Emendemus in melius, rendered here as a delicate duet between cornetto and continuo organ. The hushed and contemplative performance transformed the motetto passeggiato into a quiet meditation. Dickey’s understated phrasing merged seamlessly with the soft timbre of the organ, highlighting the music’s introspective character.
Sigismondo d’India’s two madrigals, Dilectus meus and Langue al vostro languir, marked a stylistic shift toward expressive declamation. Blažíková shaped each phrase with sensitivity and text-driven drama, while Dickey’s ornamented echoes conjured the “antiphonal lyric moment” that 17th-century musicians so prized.
Francesco Cavalli’s Sonata a 3 followed as a purely instrumental interlude. Without involving cornetto, the ensemble’s interplay across voices offered a lesson in responsiveness and elegance. The lines were passed with fluid grace, and the textures breathed with a shared precision that made the sonata feel like a poised and refined conversation in an elegant chamber.
After the interval, Giacomo Carissimi’s Summi regis puerpera returned to sacred intensity. Blažíková’s ornamentation, though restrained, drew deep affect from every phrase. Julian Wachner’s contemporary piece The Vision of the Archangels, a refreshing inclusion, felt tenderly intimate. Stripped of grandeur, the work unfolded in hushed simplicity. Blažíková’s voice, surrounded by soft ensemble murmurs, glowed with warmth and tenderness, like a grandmother’s fireside tale – direct, gentle, sincere.
Drama returned with arias from Giovanni Battista Bononcini’s Il trionfo di Camilla, but the evening’s real highlights were arias from Alessandro Scarlatti’s L’Emireno. Here, the synergy between voice and cornetto reached its rhetorical pinnacle. In “Non pianger solo dolce usignuolo”, the opera excerpt by perhaps the most vocally-minded of Baroque composers, the sound of the cornetto seemed to cast an aura around the soprano, as if paying ultimate homage to the human voice itself. Blažíková’s masterful and natural articulation intertwined with the cornetto in a climax of lyrical expression – no longer simply in dialogue, but a moment of suspension in time, like gazing into one of Nicholas Poussin’s finest canvases, where poetry and serenity converge in an eternal vision.
Throughout the evening, Dickey and Blažíková brought to life a historic ideal: not simply the resemblance of the cornetto to the voice in timbre, but the full rhetorical capacity of both as breath-driven instruments of speech and song. As French polymath Marin Mersenne poetically wrote in his Harmonie universelle (1635), the cornetto’s tone is “like a ray of sunshine piercing the shadows, when heard with the choir voices in the cathedrals or chapels”.
