Corelli: Opera Quinta – The First Six Sonatas in an Eighteenth-Century Recorder Transcription

Description

Paolo Antonio Parensi (1688–1749), belonged to one of the most prominent patrician families of Lucca and represents a cultivated example of the early eighteenth-century Italian amateur. His father, Girolamo Parensi, was among the wealthiest merchants of the Republic. After spending approximately thirty-five years in the Netherlands, he returned to Lucca in 1690 with one of the largest private fortunes in the city and remained actively engaged in political life until his death in 1713. It was within this milieu—economically powerful, internationally connected, and civically engaged—that Paolo Antonio was born and educated.
During the first decade of the eighteenth century he resided in Rome, studying at the Collegio Clementino, an institution associated with the intellectual and social formation of the Catholic elite. It is plausible that this Roman period played a decisive role in shaping his musical interests. Upon their father’s death, Paolo Antonio and his elder brother Jacopo Giuseppe inherited the family estates and continued the profitable mercantile exchanges between Lucca and the Low Countries, while maintaining an active role in civic affairs. Alongside these responsibilities, Paolo Antonio cultivated the recorder with notable seriousness, leaving tangible evidence of his engagement with contemporary repertoire.
That evidence survives today in six manuscript volumes preserved in the Sezione Musicale of the Biblioteca Palatina in Parma, within the Fondo Sanvitale, originating from the archive of the Quilici family of Lucca. Taken together, these six manuscripts form a coherent and substantial collection of recorder music dating from the first half of the eighteenth century. In the Italian context, such a corpus is exceptional both in scope and in the quality of the repertoire it transmits. Rather than an arbitrary anthology, it reflects the informed taste of a single owner and offers insight into the technical and aesthetic horizons of a highly skilled amateur.
The collection comprises the following volumes: Sanv. D. 1, “Sinfonie di Giuseppe S. Martino”; Sanv. D. 2, “Sinfonie di Francesco Barsanti”; Sanv. D. 3/I-XXII, “Sinfonie di varij Autori”; Sanv. D. 4/I–II, “Sinfonie di Arcangelo Corelli”; Sanv. D. 145/I–III, “Sinfonie di Roberto Valentini Inglese”; and Sanv. D. 146, “Sinfonie di Roberto Valentini Opera XI”.
Two of the six manuscripts are devoted to composers who were both wind players: Giuseppe Sammartini and Francesco Barsanti. The Sammartini volume (Sanv. D. 1) contains seventeen sonatas for recorder and basso continuo. Some correspond with a manuscript now preserved at the Sibley Music Library in Rochester, New York; others correspond to sonatas for transverse flute later published as part of his Op. 2, printed in Amsterdam by the publisher Le Cène around 1736. Particularly revealing is an annotation on the verso of the first flyleaf, where the pieces are categorized according to qualitative and pedagogical criteria. Certain sonatas are marked as “migliori” (better), others as “inferiori” (lesser), and several as suitable “per esercizio” (for practice). This classification indicates a pragmatic use of the repertoire: not merely for performance, but as graded material for technical development.
The Barsanti manuscript (Sanv. D. 2) preserves sonatas by Francesco Barsanti, a native of Lucca who spent most of his professional life in England and Scotland. In 1724 he published in London Sonate a flauto, o violino solo con basso per violone o cembalo. The Parma copy appears to derive directly from that printed edition, reproducing not only the musical text but also its notational layout with remarkable fidelity.
Sanv. D. 3/I-XXII, entitled “Sinfonie di varij Autori”, is the most heterogeneous of the six volumes. The corpus includes both anonymous compositions and works attributed to composers of varying prominence within the Italian musical landscape of the period. The names represented are Tomaso Albinoni, Pietro Pellegrini, Domenico Maria Dreyer, Giacomo Ferronati, Filippo Rosa, Paolo Bottigoni, Giovanni Battista Somis, Giuseppe Valentini, Giovanni Antonio Canuti, Domenico Natale Sarro, Arcangelo Corelli and Quirino Colombani.
Not only the anonymous works, but also several sonatas attributed to known composers have no concordances in the current state of research. At the same time, a number of sonatas can be identified as transcriptions from compositions originally conceived for other instruments: four derive from violin sources—two by Albinoni from his Op. 6 (one of which is transmitted here anonymously), one by Corelli, and one by Giuseppe Valentini from his Op. 4—while two further sonatas derive partially from violin works. In particular, the first two movements of the sonata in G minor attributed to Giacomo Ferronati correspond to Sonata VIII from the 1710 Sonate a violino solo Op. 1 by Lodovico Ferronati, while the final movement of “Sonata 3.a” by Giuseppe Valentini corresponds to the fourth movement, Corrente Presto, of Sonata IV from Antonio Vivaldi’s Op. 2 Sonate a violino solo e basso. Similarly, the second and third movements of the sonata by Paolo Bottigoni correspond to two movements of a cello sonata preserved in manuscript Mus.4394 at the Landesbibliothek Mecklenburg-Vorpommern Günther Uecker in Schwerin, where the name “Rasi Pospero” appears, likely reflecting a misreading or erroneous transcription of the composer’s name.
The writing style of other sonatas suggests that these too may be transcriptions from the violin repertoire. Together with the manuscript Sanv. D. 4, this volume therefore represents one of the very few Italian sources preserving recorder arrangements of repertory originally written for violin. It documents both the permeability between instrumental idioms and the active role of adaptation in domestic music-making.
Particularly substantial are the two manuscripts devoted to Robert Valentine, an English musician active in Rome. Sanv. D. 146 contains twelve sonatas drawn from two works printed in London by John Walsh: Op. XI for recorder and continuo and Op. XIII for transverse flute and continuo, published in 1735, probably in a pirated edition and likely conceived originally for the recorder. Sanv. D. 145/I–III, conceived from the outset as a composite volume, transmits eighteen sonatas divided into three groups. The first, Sonate à Flauto e Basso da Roberto Valentini à Roma, comprises six sonatas; the second, untitled, presents a further six works for recorder and continuo; the third, La Villeggiatura à 2 Flauti, is a set of six sonatas for two recorders without basso continuo. Several of these pieces have no concordance in Valentine’s known printed output.
Sanv. D. 4, dedicated to Arcangelo Corelli, occupies a central position in the collection. It consists of two distinct sections. The first (Sanv. D. 4/I), Sonate à Flauto solo del Sig.r Arcangelo Corelli, transmits the second part of Op. 5 in the well-known 1702 John Walsh transcription for recorder, Six solos for a flute and a bass by Arcangelo Corelli. The second section (Sanv. D. 4/II), entitled Sinfonie à Flauto solo e Basso del Sig.e Arcangelo Corelli Opera Quinta, forms the focus of the present recording. It is, to the best current knowledge, the only complete source of the first part of the six Op. 5 sonatas in recorder transcription.
The manuscript reveals deliberate editorial choices. The first and sixth sonatas are transposed, respectively from D major to F major and from A major to C major, adjustments that align the tonal framework more comfortably with recorder technique. Two movements—the Allegro (second movement) of Sonata IV and the Vivace (second movement) of Sonata V—have their final measures entirely rewritten to reflect a more idiomatic, recorder-oriented musical language. In Sonatas I, II, III and VI, the second movements—fugal in character and densely polyphonic—are omitted. These movements, idiomatic to the violin’s capacity for implied and real polyphony, pose intrinsic challenges for a monodic wind instrument. The copyist’s decision to omit these movements prioritizes the sonatas’ linear clarity and practical playability over strict fidelity to their original form. A comparable strategy appears in “Sinfonie di varij Autori”, where certain sonatas are assembled from movements by different composers. In those cases, when a movement proved impracticable to transpose, the transcriber likely replaced it with a more suitable alternative; in the present work, however, he opted for straightforward omission.
Considered together, these interventions reflect a consistent preference for sustained melodic projection rather than the emulation of multi-voiced texture and virtuosity. Through such simplifications, the sonatas remain intelligible and idiomatic for the recorder while preserving their broader structural coherence. At the same time, they represent the most technically demanding and structurally ambitious repertory preserved in Parensi’s library.
An alternative approach to Corelli’s Op. 5 is documented in a recorder transcription included in A Second Collection of Sonatas for Two Flutes and a Bass, by Signor Christopher Pez, to which is added some excellent solos out of the first part of Corelli’s Fifth Opera, published by John Walsh in 1707. In that source, two of the sonatas (the third and fourth) are transmitted in complete form; notably, the third sonata preserves its fugal second movement, reworked with heightened virtuosity to articulate the individual voices through figuration and registral contrast, while the slow movements are enriched with elaborate ornamentation.
By contrast, the Adagio movements in Parensi’s manuscript contain no written ornamentation. For the present recording, a detailed analysis was therefore undertaken of the embellishments found in the other volumes of the collection, which preserve numerous examples of ornamentation—models that Paolo Parensi himself would have had at his disposal.
Emanuele Gorla and Sara Campobasso © 2026