Hyperion Records

Alessandro Stradella was an important early composer of trumpet music. Like Melani, he worked in Rome for much of his career, though by 1681, when he wrote the wedding cantata Il barcheggio, he was living in Genoa; he was murdered in a Genoese street the following February and Il barcheggio is said to have been his last work. Its self-contained sinfonia sounds remarkably modern, partly because it uses a bright scoring with three equal treble parts, and partly because it has a clear four-movement structure, with logical harmonic patterns.

from notes by Peter Holman © 2003