Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer

VI Concerti Armonici

Mike Fentross | La Sfera Armoniosa

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917295528

Catalog number: CC 72955
Releasedate: 28-09-23

- A live recording of van Wassenaer’s Concerti Armonici by the well established Dutch ensemble La Sfera Armoniosa.
- These are beautiful Concerti in the Italian style (until the 80s the work was actually attributed to Pergolesi)
- This is the third instalment in La Sfera Armoniosa survey of most important Baroque orchestral works from the Netherlands
- Previous releases were devoted to De Fesch (CC 72829 – There is much to enjoy in this excellent disc (Scherzo – SP) and to Hellendaal (CC 72911)

Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer (1692-1766) is one of the most remarkable personalities in Dutch music history. Until 1980, his music - the six ‘Concerti armonici’ - was well known to every lover of early music, but not his name. These works were universally understood to be by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi or by Carlo Ricciotti, who published them in 1740 but did not compose them. Unico Wilhelm van Wassenaer was well known to Dutch historians as a descendant of the renowned noble Van Wassenaer family, but nobody knew that he was also a composer. Thanks to a lucky find by the Dutch musicologist Albert Dunning in 1980, man and music could be connected with one another. In 1740, a collection of six concertos for strings and basso continuo, was published in The Hague under the title VI Concerti armonici. The Concerti armonici can be associated with musical performances that took place in the 1720s in The Hague.