Concerti, Sinfonie, Ouverture

The long-serving Württemberg court conductor Giuseppe Antonio Brescianello (1690-1758) was an only slightly younger contemporary of Georg Philipp Telemann, Johann Sebastian Bach, George Frideric Handel and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Half a generation before him, Antonio Vivaldi was born and Johann Adolf Hasse, perhaps the most popular opera composer of the 18th century, nine years after him.

The surviving oeuvre is slender, and although an “opera pastorale” is known with Tisbe (1718), it consists mainly of instrumental chamber music and orchestral works, among which the Concerti et Sinphonie Opus 1 (Amsterdam, 1738) stands out as the only printed publication. As this recording is intended to show, the compositions are by no means merely ready-made goods from the first half of the 18th century. On the contrary, they prove to be an interesting mixture of older and newer elements, of Italian and French tradition, filled with melodic elegance, rhythmic vitality and endowed with a special feeling for the orchestral sound.

Nothing is known about Brescianello’s origins and education. In 1715 he came from Venice to Munich as a violinist in the service of the Bavarian Elector Max Emanuel, but already in 1716 he moved to the Württemberg court of Duke Eberhard Ludwig in Stuttgart, where he succeeded Johann Christoph Pez in 1717 as musique directeur, maître des concerts de la chambre. He remained in Stuttgart, where he died in 1758.

The resounding impression of Brescianello’s sonorous orchestral music speaks for itself and calls for a revision of the hitherto rather casual judgement of music historians. With his confident mastery of different European musical languages, the Italian Brescianello proves to be an interesting representative of the “mixed” German taste in music at the time of Bach and Telemann.