Special Guest Performance
by Sarah Jeffery
Concerto for Descant
Courtesy of Claudia Hansen Photography
Sarah is a professional player based in Amsterdam, although she travels widely performing and promoting recorder music. She studied at Both the Birmingham and Amsterdams Conservatoires and takes a particular interest in contemporary music..
Although firstly a musician, Sarah is probably best known to the the majority of people as the worlds number one recorder playing social media expert and her Youtube Channel ‘Team Recorder’ has met with enormous success.
Guiseppe Samartini was th older brother of Giovanni. Giovanni is generally the better known of the two, but it is Guiseppe who wrote the Concerto for Descant recorder and it is probably still his best known piece.
Born 1695 in Milan, Guiseppe spent his early years studying the Obie and Bothe he and his brother were both expert players. Most of his working life was in London in the service of the Prince of Wales where he wrote many concerti Grossi and sonatas including many for wind instruments.
- Quintet.
- Composer: Guisseppe Samartini
- Period: Baroque
- Difficulty: Tricky/Difficult
- Instruments:
- Descant
- Treble
- Tenor
- Bass
- Contra
Notes
The aim of asking Sarah to be a guest performer is that it provides us with the rare opportunity to work with people at the highest level. Whether you use it to hone your own solo ambitions and to learn from listening and copying Sarah’s work, or whether you decide to play one of the other accompanying parts, and become a port of the performance without having to take on the virtuoso top part… it still provides us all with a an interesting opportunity.
Clearly, the descant part is the hard one…. however, the other parts all have moments too, so do not think that you will have an easy time by picking a lower part. That being said, this concerto is actually quite a manageable piece to play and having been written by a woodwind player, it does sit very well for both the fingers and the breathing.
