Dinky Little Piccolo Trumpet Music...And More

It is two days past my deadline and I still await the liner notes for this record. I don't know whether their dilatoriness is owing to the modesty of the performer or the laziness of his representatives. Furthermore, I don't know that the notes will tell me much that I can't already divine for myself, so I shall forge ahead (an easy thing to forge these days!). (Editor's Note: click here to see the liner notes.)

One thing that I assume the notes would have told me is just who Edward Carroll is, whence he derives, and what his claims to fame are (other than blowing good horn). Though I have long been familiar with the Concerto Amsterdam (listed in the Schwann Artist Issue,) 14th edition, as "Amsterdam Concerto!), the Concerto Rotundam (not listed at all in Schwann) is also new to me. (Schwann does list Carroll, who seems to have recorded with New York groups, and is therefore likely to be an American.) The personnel of the Rotterdam Concerto includes Ad von Zon (who plays the other solo trumpet), Toshifumi Waki, Edward and Genevieve LeCouffe, and Arno Bons, among others, if you're interested.

Mr. Carroll, for the purposes of this program anyhow, specializes in those dinky little piccolo trumpets. Here he uses one in A (transposable to B-flat) made by B. Scherzer in East Germany and one in G made by R. Schilke in Chicago. The continuo harpsichord played by Gerard Dekker comes from R. Schutze of Heidelberg and is a copy of a Flemish instrument made around 1700. The record was taped in Rotterdam last April (1988).

LISTEN: Franceschini's Sonata in D Major, I. Grave

Some of the music on this record is likely to be familiar to baroque buffs; some of it may be familiar in other guises; some of it may be quite unfamiliar. Let's begin with this last category. The first item on the record is a sonata (no. 1 in F) by Pietro Baldassare. Baldassare was born in Rome, apparently in the penultimate decade of the 17th century. He was probably a cleric by, training. He moved to Brescia as a young man and was for a time the music director of the Oratorian church there. He was still living, according to last reports, in February 1768. He apparently was well known in his day, but the only music of his that has survived is an occasional opera, The Judgment of Paris, and three sonatas.  Of these last, one is for keyboard alone; the other two are for a wind instrument, strings, and continuo. Grove says that the solo instrument was a cornetto, but as that was by then obsolescent, I'm pretty sure Baldassare would not have been upset by Carroll's solution.

Petronio Franceschini was born (ca. 1650) in Bologna and studied there. He was a brother of Marcantonio Franceschini. (1648-1729), whose best work, in the Bolognese church of Corpus Domini in Bologna, was bombed out of existence in the last big war. Petronio went to Venice in 1680 to do an opera for one of the theaters there (he wrote at least five such works) and died unexpectedly. They buried him with considerable ceremony in the church of the Saints Giovanni & Paolo (or "San Zanipolo" as the locals call it). Franceschini was brought up in the tradition of Bolognese trumpet music (he played cello himself) and left us this sonata a 7 for two trumpets, strings, trombones, organ, and theorbo. The Rotterdammers do not include an organist or a lutenist.

The best-known and most influential of the Bolognese writers for trumpet and strings was Giuseppe Torelli (1658-1709).  Several of his D major works for this combination have been recorded. Why this one bears the name of an Amsterdam publisher I am not sure. (Most of the first publications of works by Torelli were Italian.) I could, I suppose; do a comparison listening, but at what MHS pays me, I feel justified in forgoing that task. The familiar Albinoni concerto was written originally for oboe. The Vivaldi double concerto is the much- recorded RV 537; the "single" concerto is another oboe work (RV 451).