Coming up: Veracini Sonate Accademiche

Francesco Maria Veracini’s Sonate Accademiche op.2 have always been part of my favourite repertoire: I love their combination of virtuosity, strictness and pedantry with genuine galant expression, whilst being extremely well written for the instrument (I wrote about this music in a previous blog article). Together with my colleagues Daniel Rosin (cello) and Johannes Keller (harpsichord) I played several concerts featuring these sonatas, and in 2018 we recorded a video with some excerpts from the sonata V in G minor. After that I really hoped to include at least some of these pieces in a CD recording one day. So, when Challenge Classics proposed a new collaboration, following my Mealli CD, the Sonate Accademiche were the first thing to come to my mind.

Recording the collection in its entirety (12 sonatas, each with 4 or 5 movements) would result in a musically quite repetitive triple CD. Choosing some movements from each sonata, as Veracini suggests himself in his preface (see below), would still end up being too long for CD of a normal length, and feels very incomplete.
Therefore I decided to just record a personal florilegium, an “artist’s selection” from the book, and created a programme with a nice flow and selected tonalities, consisting of parts of sonatas and single movements.

We recorded once again in St.Pantaleon (Switzerland) with my favourite sound engineer Johannes Wallbrecher. It was interesting how this music (1744) is way more focused on the violin part itself, and less of a constant exchange with the continuo group, which was a major theme in my Mealli and Di Martinelli recordings.
The album will be published in Spring 2025.

Veracini’s preface stating that the sonatas consist of several movements to create a rich collection, but that they are not supposed to be performed that way. A musician should choose some movements to his own liking in order to put together a sonata of the right length. Since certain movements, the counterpointal “capricci”, are numbered throughout the book (and not within the sonatas), it is suggested that these can be performed on their own.