34. Coffee Concert

Quartets from Italy and Spain

In this delightful concert Concerto 1700 follow the trail of three Italian composers, two of whom made their career in Spain. In the mid-18th Century composers all over Europe were looking for new ways to make music with a string quartet. Pietro Nardini was a brilliant violinist who favoured the divertimento style quartet whose emphasis was on the fireworks delivered by the first violin. Brunetti composed a prodigious number of quartets, but he never published them so they have only recently been discovered in Libraries all over Europe. His Op.3 Quartets shift away from giving all the attention to the first violin, creating a wonderfully melodic series of joyful two-movement quartets. Boccherini, a brilliant cellist, is more familiar, like Haydn he got trapped in the service of music-loving princes, and is best known for his two-cello quintets. His quartets are in four movements and demonstrate his genius as a composer with a dizzying combination of special effects.