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Giordani: 6 Flute Concertos on CD

World-premiere recordings of six attractive concertos by a Neapolitan flautist-composer celebrated in 18th-century Dublin and London.

Tommaso Giordani (1730-1806) arrived on the northern shore of the English Channel in 1753, as one of the youngest members of a conspicuously talented musical family, and found good reason never to return southwards. In Dublin he gave lessons to the boy John Field, who would later much surpass the fame of his teacher by creating the genre of the piano nocturne. Meanwhile Giordani had returned to the English capital, where he wrote most of his surviving compositions - such as this set of flute concertos, dating from 1775-9 and dedicated to a flute-playing baronet.

Each concerto follows a familiar formal pattern: a sonata-form first movement, an introspective second, often rising to a considerable peak of intensity, and a sparkling rondo-finale. Within this pattern, Giordani finds space for continual variety: the form does not constrain his invention but (in classic Baroque practice) rather supplies an elegant vessel for it.

As much as the good baronet, he was clearly writing with himself in mind as a soloist, and this is music written for display and delight, and played here in that spirit by a period-instrument ensemble of musicians based in Turin, led by the Italian flautist Giovanni Miszczyszyn. The recording was made in 2024 at the Chiesa della Santa Spirito in Turin where the musicians give a regular concert series. It is infused with not only a spirit of Giordani's age but with a chamber-music sense of collaborative enterprise.