Gasparini: Cantatas with Violins

Francesco Gasparini (1661–1727) was an unquestionably important musical figure of his time: he was a leading composer and theorist—active in Venice and Rome—and an esteemed teacher, and his continuo treatise, L’armonico pratico al cimbalo (Venice, 1708), was reprinted throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The present edition includes all of Gasparini’s extant cantatas with violins and basso continuo. These works divide into two groups: the first comprises four cantatas dating from his first stay in Rome (in the 1680s), when he was a member of the congregazione of S. Cecilia and enrolled in Cardinal Benedetto Pamphili’s orchestra; the second is a united set of sixteen cantatas composed in Rome in 1716–18 for Prince Ruspoli. Together they provide an interesting means of comparing Gasparini’s early and late compositional styles and techniques, and they fill in a tessera in the complex mosaic of the Italian Baroque cantata during the early eighteenth century, a crucial period in the development of cantata aesthetics and musical style.