Quinta Essentia

Why Francesco Geminiani is not mentioned these days alongside other great masters of the era of Baroque music is a bit of a mystery. Together with Corelli and Handel he was one of the composers who made a great career for himself in eighteenth-century Great Britain. Concerto Koln has not forgotten him, on the contrary: the ensemble pays homage to him as one of the true greats. And now the musicians have chosen their favorite pieces from his entire oeuvre and called it Geminiani's Quintessence. He was a composer, virtuoso violinist and itinerant artist, as well as being a dealer and collector of art, a musicographer and musicologist. Francesco Geminiani's life, and in particular his travels, do not read like the typical story of a more or less sedentary Baroque composer. In comparison with Johann Sebastian Bach, who hardly went beyond a 200 km radius in his entire life, Geminiani was a globetrotter who journeyed to Rome and Paris and as far as Dublin. It would seem that this restlessness is reflected in his music. Things that are hard to imagine nowadays were common practice back then: works by other composers as well as composers' own works were re-worked and arranged for other solo instruments or orchestra. In the case of Geminiani, however, the large number of arrangements of his own and other works led to a reputation of being unoriginal and lacking in imagination. As a result of his method of constantly composing and arranging, Geminiani's entire output can be divided into four categories: his Concerti Grossi and arrangements of them, arrangements of his sonatas as Concerti Grossi, and arrangements of sonatas by other composers as Concerti Grossi. Concerto Koln has chosen works from all four categories for this project, with bassoonist Lorenzo Alpert taking a leading role in selecting those rare works "which we think are the loveliest and most accomplished of his compositions."