Handel: Complete Solo..

• Händel: Complete Solo Sonatas

In the course of his profitable composer life, Georg Friedrich Handel has not only written countless masterpieces for orchestra, opera and the church. The music world owes numerous outstanding works in the field of chamber music to the native Saxony and later choice London. Handel has written 16 solo sonatas for the recorder, traver flute, oboe and the violin or the viola da gamba, whereby there are also revised second versions of some sonatas, which still pose musicology before the question of which version is now the original. The Italian old music ensemble Il Rossignolo has recorded the entire solo sonata opus for DHM for the first time with all its surviving versions and variants. A total of 27 sonatas as well as three individual movements were created during recording in Italy under the direction of harpsichord Ottaviano Tenerani with Marica Testi (traverse flute), Martino Noferi (recorder), Florian Deuter (violin) as well as the gambist Paolo Biordi as soloist. "These wonderful sonatas, with their diverse casts, keys, harmonies and forms, open up a whole new perspective on the cornucopia expressive, aesthetic and poetic expressiveness of Handel's world", says the musicians of Il Rossignolo on this unique recording project. The sonatas for solo instrument and basso continuo were created in a period between approx. 1710 and 1728 and are now known as Handel's Opus 1. Handel composed most of the sonatas probably for advanced amateur musicians from the English, but also from the Dutch and French upper classes. And apart from the three-movement "Hanoverian Sonatas" HWV 357 and 358, which were arguably written for professional musicians, most sonatas follow the four-movement model of the "Sonata da chiesa" coined by Arcangelo Corelli.