Hyperion Records

This piece is by Girolamo Fantini, serjeant trumpeter at the Florentine court. All his surviving music is found in his 1638 trumpet tutor, published for some reason in Frankfurt. It looks both forwards and backwards: it has a number of sonatas of the Renaissance type that consist of a single melodic line to which lower parts were improvised, but it also has the earliest known music for trumpet and continuo – a series of short sonatas and dances. When a harpsichord rather than an organ is used, Fantini’s title-page seems to say (though the syntax is obscure) that the trumpet should be muted.

from notes by Peter Holman © 1988