Another Eighteenth-Century Violin Virtuoso

The eighteenth century was a good period for violin virtuosos. These days the best known of them was Antonio Vivaldi, but he was one of too many to enumerate. This coming Friday Challenge Classics will release an album of music by one of the less familiar of those virtuosos. The Italian composer Francesco Maria Veracini is best known for publishing sets of violin sonatas. In his General History of Music (consisting of four volumes) Charles Burney acknowledged his “great share of whim and caprice” but then went on to write that “he built his freaks on a good foundation, being an excellent contrapuntist.” Given how music history has progressed since then, it is hard to think of Veracini as freakish, but there is no arguing with his virtuosity.

Violinist Eva Saladin on the cover of her Veracini album (from the Amazon.com Web page for this album)

This Friday Challenge Classics will release a new album, which will challenge (so to speak) the listener to decide how freakish Veracini’s music is to the contemporary ear. The fourteen tracks are all taken from the composer’s Opus 2, Sonate Accademische a Violino Solo e Basso. The violinist is Eva Saladin, with cellist Daniel Rosin accounting for the “Basso.” Continuo is provided by Johannes Keller at the harpsichord.

The tracks shuffle the movements selected from the twelve Opus 2 sonatas. This was apparently the result of Saladin following the composer’s own advice, published in the preface:

In view of the fact that each of these twelve sonatas consists of four or five movements, it is pointed out that this was done for the sake of the richness and ornamentation of the book, and also in order to offer amateurs and dilettantes of music greater pleasure. Otherwise two, or even three movements, chosen at one’s own discretion, are sufficient to form a sonata of appropriate length.

The duration of the entire album is a little over an hour and five minutes. This is a far cry from “a sonata of appropriate length,” leading this listener to wonder just how the album should be approached. Personally, given the current affordances of technology, I would have preferred to have all of the Opus 2 movements at my disposal, from which I could then exercise my “own discretion” without any limitations imposed!