Corelli’s performances in Rome were sponsored by patrons such as Cardinal Ottoboni and the Marquis Ruspoli. Surviving documents such as payment account books and eyewitness reports, however, present us with an awkward conundrum because they attest to the inclusion of trumpets, recorders and oboes in Corelli’s performances of his own music, and yet his sole extant published orchestral music is the Op 6 Concerti grossi, scored only for strings and basso continuo. For his 1997 recordings, long overdue in this reissue, Federico Maria Sardelli devised an ingenious approach to re-orchestration so that we hear Corelli’s famous concertos clothed in a wider range of colourful instrumentations. Sardelli’s erudite essay asserts that this approach ‘forces us to re-examine [Corelli’s] music from a totally different point of view from that which has prevailed up until now’.

It must be observed that nobody knows exactly what music Corelli performed with such forces – it was unlikely to be any of the Op 6 concertos in their refined published form. Nevertheless, Sardelli applied thoughtful discernment to his application of trumpets, recorders or oboes, adding them only in passages that are in suitable keys and offer appropriate rhetorical moods for such textures. An evocative and ‘authentic’ pifa is generated by the addition of oboes and recorders to the ripieno group in the famous Pastorale that concludes the Christmas Concerto, and the combination of oboes and bassoons (and a gutsy approach from the strings) works convincingly in the Largo opening of Concerto No 3 in D minor. The astute editorial invention of trumpets makes perfect sense in the fanfare-like codetta in a robust performance of Concerto No 4 in D major. There are rarely moments when the experiments backfire, such as counterproductive oboes in the Allemanda of Concerto No 10 in C major that inhibit the courtliness of the strings. This ranks as a fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable alternative view of these iconic works.