Luogo e data di registrazione		- Bennebroek (Olanda) - febbraio 1967 [1-25] - Amsterdam (Olanda) - giugno 1972 [26-38]
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Wolf Ericson [1-25] - Heinrich Weritz [26-38]
	Prima Edizione LP		- Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" - SAWT 9518-A - (1 LP) - durata 41' 06" - (p) 1968 - Analogico [1-25] - Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" - SAWT 9589-B - (1 LP) - durata 40' 54" - (p) 1973 - Analogico [26-38]
	Edizione CD		Teldec - 4509-93669-2 - (1 CD) - durata 72' 43" - (c) 1995 - ADD
	Note		-

In early eighteenth-century Italy the violin gradually displaced the recorder as a solo instrument, bringing to an end a tradition dating back many hundreds of year's. A number of the composers who had written music chiefly for the recorder drew the inevitable consequence from this development and went to live abroad. with England proving the most popular destination. One such composer was Francesco Barsanti who in 1724 published an anthology under the title Sonatas or solos for a flute with a thorough bass. The C major Sonata for recorder in f' is taken from this collection. Technically speaking, it is a highly demanding piece and attests to Barsanti’s thoroughgoing knowledge of the instrument. In England composers could still hope to find an enthusiastic audience for recorder music. Indeed, the end of the seventeenth century proved something of an Indian summer for the instrument, with household music especially being able to draw upon a wide repertory ranging from transcriptions of popular songs and operatic arias to whole operas. As a result, the recorder was often referred to on the European mainland as the flûte d'Angleterre. In France and Germany, too, the recorder continued to have an important role to play, albeit in a form adapted to suit the new multicoloured tonal ideal of orchestras around 1700. The age to which it had contributed "quiet, charming harmonies" (to quote Michael Praetorius) was past. Of the once large recorder family all that remained to contest the field were the descant and treble recorders (known in the USA as the soprano and alto respectively), since they alone were capable of taking the top line in the Baroque orchestra and of meeting the manifold needs of solo writing in chamber music. A late seventeenth»century invention is the socalled quart flute, which sounds a fourth higher than the treble instrument. One of the few pieces written for the quart flute is the Sonata in A minor by Diogenio Bigaglia, prior at the Benedictine monastery' of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. In Italy, recorder pieces were almost always published in alternative versions for Flauto o Violino or were violin works transcribed for recorder, but it was as recorder pieces that they tended to find a place for themselves in the repertory. In their version for recorder, Arcangelo Corelli`s Variations on La Follia from his op. 5 set of sonatas are one of the composers most famous pieces. These Variations were first published in Rome in 1700 but by 1702 a version for recorder had already been published by Walsh of london and by 1720 had been reprinted no fewer than twenty times. The work differs only in points of detail from the version for violin and demands a high degree of technical competence on the part of its performer, since Corelli, an accomplished violinist, conceived the work as a virtuoso bravura showpiece. The folia or ostinato bass, after which the piece is named, is a solemn, weighty theme that is subjected to a total of twenty-one variations to produce a veritable firework display of ideas. The F major Sonata comes from the satire collection. All the op. 5 pieces are of importance for the way in which Corelli has added a fifth movement to the four-movement model of the sonata da chiesa, a model that he himself had helped to establish. Francesco Maria Veracini was another accomplished violinist and one of the best-known virtuosos of his day. A meeting between him and the equally famous violinist Giuseppe Tartini is said to have left Tartini so impressed by Veracini’s bowing technique that he withdrew from public life for a time to improve his own technique and match his rival’s skills. Veracini’s forte as a composer lay in the genre of the sonata da camera as represented by the sonatas included in the present recording. Both are taken from a collection published under the title Sonate a Violino o Flauto solo e Basso and dating from the composers earliest period. Already famous as a virtuoso, the young Veracini dedicated this collection to the Prince Elector Friedrich August of Saxony in 1716. The A minor Sonata reveals him in a particularly innovative vein, the sequence of movements (Largo - Allegro - Allegro - Allegro) flying in the lace of all conventional expectations, while the hint of a second theme in the final movement already looks forward to Classical sonata form. For a long time there were doubts about the authenticity of the collection of sonatas published in Paris under the title Il pastor fido. Although these sonatas appeared under Vivaldi`s name in 1737 - in other words, towards the end of the composer's lifetime - there were suggestions that the attribution might have been designed as a marketing ploy by the publisher. Not until 1990 did suspicions become a certainty when a sworn statement was discovered confirming that the G minor Sonata was in fact the work of the contemporary musette player, Nicolas Chédeville. Only the exceptionally virtuosic final movement has been taken over, in a slightly shorter version, from the opening movement of Vivaldi's Violin Concerto in G minor RV 316. Ulrike Brenning ····· A brief history of the recorder 2. The recorder from in the 17th century An important development in the history of the recorder and its repertory took place in England in the 16th century. It was here that six members of the Bassano family from Venice settled around 1530, quickly establishing themselves as recorder players and makers. One of their number, Jacomo, later returned to Venice and, together with those of his brothers who had remained in England, formed a confraternity to produce and sell wind instruments. Evidence of the widespread popularity of Englich recorders comes in the form of two references in contemporary texts from Augsburg ("large chest containing 27 recorders, large and small, of a type made in England") and Paris ("these crumhorns are made in England", from Mersenne's treatise of 1636). In 1603, five members of a later generation of the Bassano family played the recorder at the funeral of Elizabeth I. Also from this period dates Anthony Holborne's Pavans, Galliards, Almains [...] for Viols, Violins, or Other Musicall Winde Instruments, a collection of five-part dances for broken consort, i.e., an ensemble comprising different kinds of instruments, generally gambas and recorders. In this case, one assumes that larger instruments such as tenor, basset, bass and great bass were used. Michael Praetoriu's encyclopædic study of the theory and practice of music, Syntagma musicum (1614-20), includes, in its second part, a list of eight different sizes of recorder - Klein Flöttlin (g"), Discant (d"), Discant (c"), Alt (g'), Tenor (c'), Basset (f), Bass (B flat) and Grossbass (F). The larger instruments, he suggest, could be used together in a consort. (He also mentions that voices and instruments could be combined in a consort.) Praetorius was the first to state that recorders normally sounf an octave higher than they are notated and that the length of the tube could be altered in order for the instrument to be tuned. (It was not yet usual at this time to construct the tube in two sections.) He also mentions that it was possible to buy a great consort, comprising 21 recorders from Klein Flöttin to Grossbass, for 80 thalers in Venice. In his Harmonie universelle of 1636/7, Marin Mersenne divides recorders into two sets, a petit jeu comprising dessus in g', haute-contre & taille in c', and basse in f, and a grand jeu made up of dessus in f, haute-contre & taille and basse, in other words, five different sizes. Mersenne describes the recorder variously as the "fluste d‘Angleterre" (English flute), the "fluste douce" (a reference to its “sweet” tone) and the "fluste à neuf trous" (a reference to the instrument's eight finger-holes and one thumb-hole), adding "The [...] large flutes were sent to one of our kings from England". As an example of music for a recorder consort he quotes a four-part Gavote pour les Flustes douces by Henry le Jeune, ie., Jehan Henry the Younger. In 1646 Paulus Matthysz of Amsterdam published Der Fluyten Lust-hof, a collection of "psalm, pavans and allemandes", as well as well-known songs of the period, compiled and ornamented by Jacob van Eyck of Utrecht. In his foreword, Matthysz describes the hand-fluit, a recorder in c" similar to our modern descant (American: soprano) recorder. This instrument was still made of a single piece of wood and had a range of two octaves and a note. This is the sort of instrument that was frequently reproduced in 17th-century Dutch paintings and engravings, generally as part of genre scenes depicting domestic interiors, taverns or street life. Peter Holtslag Translation: Stewart Spencer