While for the most celebrated instrumentalists who defined the period straddling the seventeenth century and
the eighteenth, the subsequent interest in the magnificence of late Baroque music promoted their relaying and
study, this fate was not shared by Martino Bitti. After having been relegated on the fringe of the history of
music, and perfunctorily accused, in the earliest, scanty biographic notes, of lacking in originality and
innovative qualities, only in recent times did he begin to be the object of in-depth investigations and writings on
the analysis and cataloguing of his works (see Michael Talbot’s ground- breaking essays). In any case, what
emerges from an examination of the sources relevant to Bitti’s biography is the figure of a musician who was
fully integrated in one of the contexts that were most lively and stimulating for the Italian musical production
between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth: the court of Prince
Ferdinando de’ Medici (Florence 1663-1713), eldest son of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo iii de’ Medici. The
recording of the Sonatas presented here is the final stage of a work of in-depth research that began with the
study of the first editions and the experimentation of timbres and interpretations on copies of the early
instruments, leading to the creation of a historically informed product.
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