Turrini: 12 Sonatas for Harpsichord

Early-Classical keyboard sonatas by a north-Italian contemporary of Beethoven, much esteemed in his day and now almost unknown. Brilliant Classics has long specialised in illuminating the music of composers who are largely lost to posterity – especially from Italy, and especially from the 17th and 18th centuries. Here is another name to conjure with and to quicken the blood of collectors eager to add another name to their shelves: Ferdinando Turrini, born in the town of Salò in 1845. His death date is much more uncertain – between 1812 and 1829 – but he passed away in Brescia, where he had become a much esteemed teacher, organist, master of music and composer. Blindness afflicted Turrini in his late 20s, but it appears not to have stemmed the flow of an output that ranged from operas to sacred and instrumental music. Nearly all of it is now lost to us, and what survives does so almost exclusively in manuscript. In fact the six keyboard sonatas dedicated to the Genovese patrician Carlo