Haendel Sonates pour flûte Rossi Baiano - STR37274 - Stradivarius - Classique

The reconstruction of the compositional chronology of Georg Friedrich Händel’s repertoire for flute is extremely complex. There are various reasons for this, stemming from two essential factors: on the one hand, the typical tendency for much of Händel’s music to transmigrate from one instrument to another and the consequent impossibility, at times, of determining precisely which version of a particular piece is the original; on the other hand, the proliferation, at a time when no copyright regulations existed, of diverse printed editions. Many of these, unauthorised, generated different versions, errors or misinterpretations, which were possibly also passed on over time. For this CD recording, which features a substantial part of the complete corpus of the sonatas for recorder and transverse flute, we compared the two earliest printed versions containing sonatas for solo instrument by Händel. Both were published by the London publisher Walsh, although for a long time the first of the two editions was attributed to the Amsterdam publisher Roger, but then, thanks to the studies of Terence Best and David Lasocki, it turned out to be a ‘pirate’ publication by the same publisher Walsh (who probably had not yet obtained Händel’s permission to publish).