One contemporary obituary remarked that Francesco Barsanti (1690-1775) deserved to be held ‘in the highest estimation by all true lovers of that science’ - the science in question being the practice of music to which Barsanti had dedicated himself so usefully within English cultural life for the previous five decades.

The Sonatas featured here were first published in 1728, with a title page suggesting their suitability for flute, though a later edition allowed for an oboe instead. The seven musicians of Ensemble ConSerto Musico have taken their cue from this flexibility and presented the sonatas with the top line played alternately by a violin, a flute and an oboe. Interleaved between the sonatas are arrangements made by Barsanti of Scots folktunes such as ‘O Dear Mother, What Shall I Do’ and ‘Corn Riggs Are Bonny’.

Thus the album presents an attractive varied musical sequence as well as a handsome illustration of Barsanti’s diverse talents. Born in the Puglian town of Lucca, he arrived in the English capital at some point in the early 1720s, and rapidly made himself useful as a jobbing musician, copyist and composer, without ever attaining the celebrity of a Handel or even a Geminiani. Hence his relative obscurity in our own age.

However, the sonatas demonstrate more than a fluent contrapuntal technique. The melodic lines are always gracefully turned, whether slow or quick, and while they have been carefully made not to demand virtuoso performance, Barsanti’s art conceals considerable sophistication in form and construction which makes the sonatas as pleasing to play as to listen to.

His profile was perhaps lower among his professional colleagues, but this seems to have been due more to his own unassertiveness than to any lack of respect.

The sonatas, as well as the rest of his considerable surviving output, pursue a goal of combining learned technique (in form and polyphony) with fashionable trends in taste which would sell his music and carry it to new audiences, and beyond Handel and Geminiani, no composer in 18th-century England fulfilled that aim beyond Barsanti himself.