Francesco Antonio Bonporti

Featured on:
Perle del Barocco cdc 008
Perle/Paganini cdc 008/009

Real Audio:
Concerto in Fa maggiore
per Violino e Archi (Recitativo)

Francesco Antonio Bonporti (baptised in Trento 11 June 1672, died in Padua 19 December 1749) was a very special artist and also a man of the Church. He studied the humanities at Trento and graduated in philosophy at Innsbruck. He then attended courses in theology at the Collegium Germanicum in Rome. He also studied composition with Pitoni and may have studied the violin with Corelli. Although he spent a great deal of his life in his city of birth, Bonporti managed to obtain fame at a Eurospean level. He liked to define himself as an "amateur of music" and his name only emerged from a silence which had lasted for two centuries some decades ago when a number of musical scholars discovered that some of Bach’s "interventionem" came from his "Opera X".

Distant from the worldliness of

the fashionable artistic trends of his time, and never constrained by having to depend on buyers or institutions, Bonporti expressed himself with great freedom and in a highly personal style. As this Recitativo dal concerto in F major well demonstrates, his work was characterised by the delightful inventiveness of its rythmic forms, the brilliance of its harmonies, and the warm radiance of its melodic line.