12 Sonates pour flûte à bec et basse continue, Opus 1

Description

In the 18th century, printing musical scores was expensive, and copying manuscripts was a common practice. The works featured on this first recording come from a five-volume collection of music for recorder titled Sinfonie dei varij autori, named after Paolo Antonio Parensi (1688-1749); he was considered an amateur musician from Lucca, Italy. Several pieces in this collection are by Robert Valentine, whose life remains poorly documented: originally from Leicester (England), he moved to Rome in his early twenties to build his career. While the nature of his connections with Parensi remains unknown, this collection is an invaluable source for the Italian repertoire for recorder from the early 18th century.