L'arte dell'violoncello piccolo

Chamber Music

Monday, 24 July 2023
7.30 pm, Vers-l'Eglise Church

Slightly smaller than a normal cello and with four strings, the piccolo cello was particularly popular in the Baroque period, especially with Johann Sebastian Bach, who used it as an obbligato instrument in his sacred cantatas, making use of its extra high E string. It is therefore all but absurd to think – as the Italian virtuoso Mario Brunello has done – that the same Bach would have appreciated the performance on this instrument of the sonatas and partitas he wrote for the violin during his golden years in Köthen, especially since he was himself, like many of his Baroque peers, a fan of “recycling” – think of his concertos for harpsichord and violin, whose manuscripts overlap to such an extent that one no longer knows which is the arrangement and which the original.