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Giovanni Bononcini

Sinfonia Dall' oratorio Il Giosuè  Play

Baroque Band Ensemble

Recorded on 10/20/2008, uploaded on 10/06/2010

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Sinfonia Dall' oratorio Il Giosuè          Giovanni Bononcini

Henry Purcell, known to English people as the "Orpheus Britannicus," had died too early (he was about thirty six at the time of his death). Without an obvious artistic successor, England's interest in foreign talent increased, and it was heightened by the arrival of the young Saxon musician, Georg Friedrich Haendel, who would live to become a naturalized English subject with the name of George Frideric Handel. Handel's chief rival in the first third of the eighteenth century was a man by the name of Giovanni Bononcini. Bononcini had arrived in England via Rome and Vienna—in 1719, when the Earl of Burlington was on a journey to Italy, Bononcini was engaged as the director of the Royal Academy of Music, the rival of Handel's "Opera of the Nobility." Until his eventual downfall for perceived Jacobite sympathy (after all, he was an Italian catholic), Bonocini created a center of competition for Handel, aptly summed up in the words to a popular catch (round):

Some say that Signor Bononcini
Compared to Handel's a mere ninny;
Others aver that to him Handel
Is scarcely fit to hold a candle.

Strange that all this difference should be
Twixt Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee!
(The Catch Club, or Merry Companions)

David Schrader