Affari a Quattro Ruote

Sonate a Quattro are the brilliant compositions from Italian composer Gioachino Rossini, written during the summer of 1804 at the young age of 12. These works, at the time, were commonly performed by wind quartet and it wasn’t until 1954 when the original manuscripts were discovered in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. showing their original arrangement for string quartet.

Most listeners to 18th century music in the modern era are well familiar with JS Bach, perhaps his sons Karl Philipp Emanuel, Wilhem Friedemann, and Johann Christian, certainly Handel, Vivaldi, and Scarlatti, and perhaps Purcell. In the last 30 years we are fortunate to have been given access through CD recordings to similar music from the enormous host of contemporaries of these masters of the Baroque, and it is constantly astonishing how high the quality of the written music was throughout the 18th century. Surely there were mediocre or perhaps poor composers, but the sheer number of really good ones continues to amaze.

Italian master Baldassare Galuppi's catalog is so heavy with opera, sacred vocal works, and solo harpsichord pieces that it tends to dwarf his tiny output of purely instrumental music, a good deal of which awaits proper documentation. The odd-numbered set of seven Concerti a Quattro recorded here by Genoa-based newcomers Ensemble Il Falcone on the Italian Dynamic label originate not with a published set, but a set of manuscript parts in the Biblioteca Estense in Modena. The first printed editions of these concerti came out in the early '60s, and a few have been recorded as separate items, with L'Offerta Musicale being the first to release a recording of the whole set for Tactus in 2000. According to Dynamic, neither of the two published editions was pressed into use here; the music is played from the original manuscript parts.