The name of violinist and conductor Evaristo Felice Dall'Abaco does not necessarily spring to one's lips when significant figures of the late Baroque period are under consideration. To summarize, he was a contemporary of Antonio Vivaldi and the Veronese-born master of music attached to the court of Maximilian II Emanuel, Elector of Bavaria. As such, Dall'Abaco spent the first 11 years of his tenure in exile with the Elector in the Netherlands, and later, in France. This time spent in French-speaking lands could not help but to impact Dall'Abaco's style, and while Dall'Abaco settled in with the Elector when he was finally restored to his rightful position in Munich in 1715, the music made at Maximilian's court remained resolutely French in character afterward. In terms of the formal construction of his music, Dall'Abaco is viewed as conservative in that he readily adopted the forms introduced by Arcangelo Corelli and seldom departed from them, though when he did so, the results are appealing and revelatory. Like Corelli, Dall'Abaco produced exactly six published sets of music containing 66 works; another 20 are known from manuscript sources.
In the notes to Stradivarius' E.F. Dall'Abaco: Sonate, violinist
Giorgio Sasso, the following: "The idea of devoting a CD to selection of seven of Dall'Abaco's sonatas, rather than an entire set of them as is commonly done, belies the intention of stressing this little known musician's inspiration, rather than his craftsmanship." This is a wise choice, as 36 of Dall'Abaco's 86 extant works are instrumental sonatas and are made up of movements a little longer than the average for instrumental sonatas in this period. While the quality of Dall'Abaco's artisanship is of a uniform character from one work to the next, the quality of inspiration is distributed more unevenly among the works appearing in his three published sets of sonatas (Opp. 1, 3 and 4). The seven sonatas heard on E.F. Dall'Abaco: Sonate are drawn from Opp. 1 and 3, and the music in Opus 3 seems the more affecting than that in the earlier publication, although all of the music is never less than "good." The performance by Insieme Strumentale di Roma is very well done and sounds throughout like a much bigger group than just the four musicians heard here, although at times leader
Giorgio Sasso's violin tone is a bit on the sweet side. Stradivarius' recording is clear and spacious, made in the church of Saint Alessio in Rome, although in pieces where harpsichord is used in the continuo rather than organ the harpsichord is hard to hear.
Concerto Köln made an outstanding recording of Dall'Abaco's concertos for Teldec some years ago; if one is already in possession of the
Concerto Köln disc, and likes it, then Stradivarius' E.F. Dall'Abaco: Sonate will make for a nice companion to it.