Roberto Valentini : Sonates pour flûte à bec - Capella Musicale Enrico Stuart

Description

Roberto Valentini (1671-1747) was born in Leicester and probably remained in England until the age of 21, before emigrating to Italy and settling in Rome. A multi-instrumentalist, Valentini began his career in the papal city as a violinist, cellist, and oboist, but he is best known as a composer for the recorder, an instrument in which he also excelled. After an initial and almost total adherence to the Corellian style, he gradually adopted the sonata collections published in Northern Europe and the stylistic characteristics of an emerging galant style. His preserved musical work is exclusively instrumental, mainly dedicated to the recorder. Valentini was also an active teacher of the recorder and knew how to profit from the instrument's popularity among amateur musicians of his time. As an expatriate maintaining close ties with his homeland, it is even possible that he imported and sold English recorders in his adopted country. Two major instrument makers were active in London at that time: Peter Bressan and Thomas Stanesby. Copies of their instruments were therefore chosen for this recording. The twelve Sonatas for Recorder, Op. 5, were published in London between 1715 and 1720, in a style perfectly suited to this instrument and intended for a wide audience of amateurs. They were inspired by Italian sonatas for violin and basso continuo, notably Corelli's Opus 5. Valentini's first three sonatas present the solemn style of the "Sonata da Chiesa," while the following ones contain more graceful, dance-like movements, typical of the "Pièces de caractère" of French origin. The six Sonatas for Two Recorders "La Villeggiatura" are among the five manuscript volumes of recorder music dating from the first half of the 18th century, preserved in the Music Section of the Palatine Library in Parma. The sonatas show characteristics indicating a probable publication date of 1730, and the collection was a great success, thanks to Valentini's talent for combining brilliant and pleasant writing with relative ease of execution in fast tempos - satisfying both performers and audiences - and a delightful and expressive melody, with many written suggestions for the diminution of cadences in the slow sections.