Baroque Masterpieces (Incls Marcello 'Oboe Concerto' & Handel 'Largo')

"A most attractive programme" (CD Review)

The first half of the eighteenth century brought the final flowering of music in a style that later became known as the Baroque, a term borrowed from art history and originally pejorative in its suggestion of roughness and irregularity. The music of Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach and Vivaldi, leading composers of the late Baroque period in Europe, may seem now to be anything but this.

The present collection includes two composers from what is now generally known as the Middle Baroque period, the second half of the seventeenth century. In Italy Arcangelo Corelli had a position of importance in Rome as a violinist and composer, employed by the blue-stocking exiled Queen Christina of Sweden and by those princes of the Church, the Cardinals Pamphili and Ottoboni, enlightened patrons with whom Corelli established a satisfactory relationship. He died in Rome early in 1713. His contribution to music was very considerable, with a set of twelve published Concerti grossi which served as a model for later composers such as Handel, a dozen sonatas for violin and basso continuo, six of them chamber sonatas and six in the more formal style of church sonatas, and forty-eight Trio Sonatas similarly divided. The Concerto grosso, Op. 6, No.8 is the best known of all, with its extra final movement, establishing it as a Christmas Concerto, to be played on Christmas Eve and reflecting in the additional Pastorale the scene of the shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem. The concerto follows, otherwise, the normal form of the concerto grosso, with a solo group of two violins, cello and harpsichord or organ, the concertino, contrasted with the rest of the string orchestra.