Giustini: Sonate da Cimbalo di piano e forte, Nos. 1, 2, 7, 8, 10 & 11

Brunner, Wolfgang

CPO 777 207-2

Giustini’s Sonate da cimbalo di piano, e forte detto volgamente di martelletti are today regarded as the first extant compositions for the fortepiano. Even though Giustini’s compositions follow the traditional form of the church sonata, they reveal stylistic elements anticipating a new era and going on two generations later to function as the standard repertoire of the piano composers of the Storm and Stress and the classical era. Not much is known about Giustini’s life and work in his native Pistoia except that he was active as an organist at several churches. During a long period of absence from Pistoia, he wrote the sonatas as a commissioned work for the Brazilian cleric and diplomat João de Seixas da Fonseca Borges in the nearby Florence, the capital of Tuscany. The compositions expressly written for the fortepiano developed by Bartolomeo Cristofori toward the end of the seventeenth century have now been interpreted by Wolfgang Brunner with stylistic mastery on a Cristofori copy by Reiner Thiemann (Nuremberg, 1995). Even though these pieces do not involve piano sonatas of the late eighteenth-century type or in the manner of Domenico Scarlatti, the Essercizi per gravicembalo produced by Scarlatti at the Portuguese court did not remain uninfluenced by the new possibilities of musical language articulated in Giustini’s work.

CD x 1

CPO

26.08.10

761203720729