Veracini and Pisendel

On May 9 of this year I performed a concert for the Konzertgemeinde Frauenfeld together with Daniel Rosin (cello), Josías Rodríguez Gándara (guitar) and Johannes Keller (harpsichord).

The concert featured three of the twelve Sonate Accademiche by Francesco Maria Veracini, along with the famous unpublished solo sonata in a-minor by his Dresden colleague or rival Johann Georg Pisendel. I also included a cello sonata by another famous Italian violinist, Francesco Geminiani, and a harpsichord toccata by Alessandro Scarlatti.

As Veracini himself writes in the preface of his Sonate Accademiche, these pieces are not supposed to be performed with all their movements. The amateur might enjoy playing all four or five movements of each sonata (which are, indeed, very long, and include at least one complicated fugal “capriccio”), but the professional will choose only two or three to his own taste, in order to compile a sonata of the right length. This is what we did in the concert: we left out some movements of two sonatas, and the third one, the famous chromatic sonata, we split into two halves.
Personally I enjoy this music very much, because it shows that it is possible to find exactly the right balance between music that is highly intellectual, constructed and almost pedantic, and yet naturally violinistic, full of effects and enjoyable for the audience.

This is the video I recorded with Daniel Rosin and Johannes Keller of two movements of the second sonata: