Description
Despite the popularity today of the works of Giuseppe Sammartini (1695–1750), his life, career, and playing have not been studied in detail before. Rather, he has remained in the shadow of his brother Giovanni Battista and such famous colleagues as George Frideric Handel. In the present book, Benoît Laurent surveys a large number of biographical and musical sources to give us a fresh look at the man whom Sir John Hawkins (1776) called “undoubtedly the greatest [performer on the hautboy] that the world has ever known.” The book explores Sammartini’s early career in Milan and Venice, his season in Brussels, and his last twenty years in London, where he
played in Handel’s Opera Orchestra, participated in the Opera of the Nobility alongside Farinelli and Porpora, then retired to compose and teach the Princess of Wales and her children. It also looks at the evidence of what exactly made him such an outstanding performer. The thematic catalogue is the first ever published of his compositions.
