Triosonatas

The Sonatas a tre by Giuseppe Tartini (born in Pirano d”Istria in 1692 and died in Padua in 1770) are generally overlooked by scholars and musicians, as they are considered to be minor works. On the contrary, though, they are of great interest to performers and listeners, both when related to the historical development of this kind of instrumental work in 18th century Italy, and to the better-known violin concertos and sonatas he composed in his nearly eighty years. He wrote almost forty three-part instrumental works, as can be seen from the subject catalogue compiled by Paul Brainard , the main reference point also for the classification of his compositions. Apart from a sonata (in F major, Brainard F1), an autograph conserved separately, also including movements from three sonatas, from different sources, the whole corpus has been handed down to us in non-autograph manuscripts, and some editions that appeared in Paris, Amsterdam and London , between 1749 and 1756. The different editions of the same pieces from different sources, do not allow us to establish which of them is the most important, which leads us to suppose that none of them was considered to be the official version at that time. But the collection in manuscript 1906 conserved in the Musical Archives of the Cappella Antoniana in Padua, contains practically all the Sonatas a tre attributed to Tartini; it is the largest source of his compositions and also includes works that cannot be found elsewhere. This is why we chose this collection for the performance of all the Sonatas on this CD, with the exception of the one in D major, Brainard D11: the version of this that we used was printed in Paris in 1749 , and consists of three, instead of two, movements.