OMAGGIO A CORELLI

CORRELLI’S SYMPHONY: Concerto Stella Matutina, Collegium Marianum, Croatian Baroque Ensemble, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Hiro Kurosaki, Veronika Skuplik

Arcangelo Corelli – the name itself is music. Arcangelo Corelli the «archangel» of the violin: connoisseurs value him as the inventor of the concerto grosso and can whistle the Pastorale from his Christmas concerto by heart. Only a few film buffs know that the adagio from this selfsame concerto was the film music for «Master & Commander» (2003). Insiders know that Francesco Geminiani reworked the opus 5 violin sonatas – including the famous d minor sonata «La Follia» (madness, frenzy) – by his teacher Corelli into concerti grossi.
The historical occasion for an «Omaggio a Corelli» was of course the 300^th anniversary of the death of the composer (January 8^th 1713). The artistic motive was not only to place Corelli’s music in the context of his contemporaries as well as his predecessors and successors, but also to make an unusual experiment. It is only a little-known fact that the orchestra of Corelli’s time in Rome could sometimes be extremely large. So we may consider ourselves lucky, rather like the patrons of Corelli’s time around 1700 in Rome, to be able to hear a large-scale orchestra – a «baroque symphony orchestra» – playing music by Arcangelo Corelli on historical instruments.

Recorded at Internationale Barocktage Stift Melk