Wassenaer: 6 Concerti Armonici

   in Early Music Today (Mar, 2015)
Unico Wilhelm, Count van Wassenaer (1692–1766), would have had a more prominent reputation as a composer if he had allowed his set of six concertos for strings to be published under his own name. Instead, he concealed his authorship, while permitting Carlo Ricciotti, an Italian violinist, to print them. After that, attribution of the concertos shifted to Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, and Stravinsky accepted this in his use of the Allegro Moderato fourth movement of the second concerto as the basis for his famous Tarantella in his ballet suite Pulcinella.

Van Wassenaer’s cover was blown in 1979, when the Dutch musicologist Alfred Dunning studied a manuscript found at the Wassenaer home, Twickel …