CORELLI'S LEGACY

Arcangelo Corelli's legacy is immense, and even he knew it. The instrumental sonata in a few structurally coherent movements, as it exists today, is essentially his invention. The legacy under consideration on this Belgian release is narrower: after one sonata by Corelli himself, you hear works by his students and followers, many of whom played major roles in the musical life of England in the early 18th century. The most famous of these was Francesco Geminiani, who gets a lot of ink in the booklet (in English, French, German, and Italian) but is oddly not represented in the program. Instead there's music by a host of lesser lights, much of it known only to scholars; the sonatas by Giovanni Carbonelli, Giovanni Mossi, and Pietro Castrucci, as well as an unaccompanied gigue by Antonio Montanari, are world-premiere recordings. The Violin Sonata, Op. 8/10, of Pietro Locatelli effectively integrates showpiece virtuosity with clean structural lines, but the rest of the music tends to pick u