Mr. Corelli In London - Recorder Concertos / Steger, English Concert (2010)

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Mr. Corelli In London - Recorder Concertos / Steger, English Concert (2010)

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Recorder virtuoso Maurice Steger, deftly assisted by The English Concert and Laurence Cummings, performs a sparkling program of concertos fashioned by the English adherents of Arcangelo Corelli from the Italian master’s visionary Violin Sonatas, Op.5. London around 1730: Although he never set foot on English soil and his compositions were already half a century old, Corelli was the absolute darling of London’s society. The musicians close to Handel soon realised that they were far more likely to succeed if they incorporated Corelli’s themes as opposed to only performing their own works. Variations on Corelli and new versions of his older pieces were soon de rigeur. Over the course of the next few years, Corelli’s violin sonatas Opus 5 were complemented by large numbers of virtuoso adaptations. This music corresponded perfectly to the musical taste of the times and although originally composed for the violin, the sonatas were soon performed in almost every conceivable instrumentation.

In today’s popular music, it’s called a cover version; back then it was standard practice. Well-known melodies are used and adapted to the player’s technical abilities and the prevailing trends of the times. Francesco Geminiani, James Paisible, Pietro Castrucci,

John Loeillet, William Babell and Robert Valentine are just a few composers who adapted Corelli’s music and through variations, ornamentations and orchestrations left their mark on the originals. Francesco Geminiani’s orchestral version of the Opus 5 sonatas serves as the basis for Maurice Steger’s current project. The recorder soloist uses this beautiful fabric of sound to perform the original variations, which survived as handwritten sheet music. They come to life as wonderful lyrical or virtuoso adaptations that sometimes test the boundaries of what is technically possible.

Composer: Francesco Geminiani
Performer: Maurice Steger
Conductor: Laurence Cummings
Orchestra/Ensemble: English Concert

Reviews: In the 1720s, the music of Arcangelo Corelli (1653–1713) was the choice for social music-making in London. The violin sonatas of his op. 5 (1700) provided wonderful grist for the mill of adaptation. Francesco Geminiani arranged a number of them into concerti, and we get four of those here, further adapted for recorders. Many of these were then ornamented, often extravagantly, by yet others, as Maurice Steger amply demonstrates. In a brief essay in the accompanying booklet, Steger talks about the thrill of the chase in turning up these variations in diverse manuscripts surviving from these gatherings.


If you know Handel’s recorder sonatas, you will have some idea of the musical shape of Corelli’s; basically, a broad melody over a bass. The tunes are sturdy enough to allow for no ornamentation and porous enough to leave room for a great deal. In the manuscript scores from the various music societies that Steger studied for this recording, he discovered that a great deal of ornamentation was preferable to none, and it is these he takes on and of which he shows no fear. Make no mistake, there are a lot of notes here, more than enough to shame a fiddler.


Steger is a wonderfully deft player, with absolute clarity of note and line, even in the most virtuosic variations, of which there are many. Nonetheless, one of the most interesting pieces comes at the very end of the disc, when, after the torrents of notes in the seventh concerto, he plays the gentle variations by Jacques or James Paisible upon the Sarabande of the original sonata. This is a large-scaled ground-bass piece that increases in intensity as it goes along, without giving way to the flashy cascades that are a feature of most of the rest of the pieces. Steger’s tone is narrower than, say, Erik Bosgraf’s on his recent Handel disc, but it is not unpleasant for that. He is wonderfully backed by the English Concert. There is no direct competition for this program, but there are at least four recordings of all the op. 5 violin sonatas from which most of the material for these recorder versions comes.