Affetto e Affetti

Affetto e affetti: these words, which could be translated as "tenderness and passions", describe well the qualities that the violin expresses marvelously in the Italian sonatas, since their appearance at the beginning of the XVIIth century. This capacity to express affects - from the greatest gentleness, in the Adagio affettuoso movements, to the most violent fury of the allegro - fascinated (and frightened) the French. But with the publication of Arcangelo Corelli's sonatas in 1700, they also discovered a more polished, more classical violin, whose style was better suited to their own instrumental music.

It is therefore the Italian-French epic of these composers that this program illustrates, from the last burning sparks of the Seicento, with Isabella Leonarda and Giovanni Antonio Pandolfi, to the dramatic excesses of Veracini, which contrast with the divinely Arcadian atmosphere of Corelli, also present in the works of his first French admirers, Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre and François Couperin.