The Scoring of Baroque Concertos (review)

Richard Maunder has probably studied more Baroque concertos from primary sources than anyone else on earth. This places him in the ideal position to write a modern counterpart to Arthur Hutchings's once deservedly influential but increasingly dated study The Baroque Concerto (1961). In part, he has done just that. But everything discussed in this book is subordinated to a quest to find a definitive answer to a single, burning question: were the great majority of Baroque concertos conceived by their composers and realized by contemporary performers as chamber music, with one player to a part and no sixteen- foot tone—or were they orchestral in the modern sense? Repetitively, and eventually wearisomely, every musical source and every repertory is placed under the microscope in order to find out how well it bears out this thesis.

This question would be well worth investigating in depth if the antithesis proposed above were not false from the start. Baroque musicians dealt as little as possible with 'right' and 'wrong' ways of making up the performing ensemble. They were ultra-pragmatic in their approach. This is why Quantz, in his discussion of the proper size of an orchestra in his Versuch, wastes no time on proposing ideal—still less, mandatory— numbers. He assumes, rightly, that different conditions and different opportunities will cause these to vary greatly. What concerns him is that the ensemble should be well balanced between treble, middle, and bass. One or more double basses join the cello or cellos once the ensemble grows beyond a certain size—subject, as ever, to their availability. The raison d'être of early instrumental concertos, of which the first examples were probably composed during the 1680s, was their suitability for large ensembles in which part-sharing (Dr Maunder's useful expression) was practised. Because this was something of a novelty at the time outside the larger institutions, the purchasers of published concertos had to be reassured that such doubling was in order—and, in some cases, to be warned off performing designated solo parts similarly. But in no instance known to me was it suggested, even in these formative years, that one-to-a-part performance was actually undesirable, still less invalid. Nor was it ever stated that, in the absence of a 'solo' marking, a passage should not be played with doubled instruments. In the eighteenth century, chamber music (which included the chamber symphony) had not yet acquired its modern connotation of strictly one-to-a-part performance: it denoted a type of locale—not a church and not a theatre— and, by extension, a recreational rather than functional purpose. Underpinning Maunder's theory seems to be an assumption that the second meaning always implied the first.

So this is not an 'either-or' issue. Now as then, it is more a matter of matching artistic intentions to resources and performing situations. Most of the music discussed by Maunder reached players in published form. To publish is to disseminate, and to disseminate is to relinquish control over the performing situation. Composers knew this well, which is why it was in their interest to maximize the flexibility of the published product—to build in a choice factor. This is why Corelli's Concerti grossi Op. 6 and Vivaldi's L'estro armonico are not simple reflections of performing practice at the institutions for which they worked at the time of composition. We do not need to tot up Ottoboni's household musicians or the members of the coro at the Ospedale della Pietà, unless we decide to attempt, probably for reasons more musicological than musical, an approximation to an aural 'facsimile' of a known historical performance of the chosen work. When Corelli states, on his title page, that the Op. 6 concertos may be performed in trio-sonata style by the concertino alone, he means just what he says, although Maunder will have none of it (pp. 71-2), arguing in effect that because the removal of the viola part...