Capriciosi Affetti takes us on a journey around the instrumental sonata in early 17th-century Venice through two and three-part compositions with continuo by Biagio Marini, Giovanni Battista Fontana, Dario Castello, Giovanni Picchi, Giovanni Legrenzi, and Marco Uccellini. Ranging from the tradition of the Canzon da Sonar and the Musica a Ballo, our journey certifies the wealth of experimentation within the sonata concertante, with its kaleidoscopic variety of contrasts. Along with the outcomes of vocal music, musing around the affetti played a pivotal part in the development of instrumental writing that was as idiomatic as it was advanced from a technical, timbral, and sound point of view. Composers called affetti those peculiar technical and execution modalities of expression through which instrumental music, lacking a written text, wished to give an abstract representation of the variety of accents and everchanging inflections within human passions and frames of mind.
