"emilio D'emilio"

Piani was well enough regarded in his own time to get hired in Paris and then across the continent in Vienna, where he spent the last four decades of his life. He has been forgotten probably because the group of Sonatas, Op. 1, that are excerpted here are his sole surviving works. With the rise in popularity of Francesco Maria Veracini and the other Italians who took their music to France and England in the early 18th century, Piani is worth getting to know.

Lovers of the Spanish Baroque may be surprised to see the subtitle "17th-century violin music in Spain" here, inasmuch as non-keyboard instrumental chamber music following Italian models has never surfaced before. Indeed, the booklet transmits statements by writers of the time bemoaning the lack of such violin music. What's happening here is that Spanish historical-instrument group La Real Cámara and its director-violinist Emilio Moreno have hypothesized that Spanish organ music might have been arranged for other instruments in the same way Italian music certainly was; Girolamo Frescobaldi specifically attested to this.