The practical experiment of adding trumpet parts on top of some of Corelli's concertos, was carried out during an orchestral production of the Early Music Department's student orchestra of the Royal Conservatory of The Hague (NL) in October 2022. 67 An orchestra of 24 stringed instruments, 2 lutes and 1 harpsichord, was joined by 4 trumpets, 1 trombone and 1 timpani. The strings were divided as such: 12 violins, 4 violas, 5 cellos, 3 double basses, thus achieving the “ideal” Corellian balance between the internal forces. Trombone and timpani appear in the S. Beatrice d’Este’s paying documents and this is the reason why they were included in the orchestra. 68 After three days of intense rehearsals, a concert was performed in the Lutherse Kerk of The Hague on October 14th. The performance was audio and video recorded and most of the visual and audio material included in this presentation is taken from that event. 69 The program presented Corelli's original Sinfonia for the Oratorio della Santa Beatrice d'Este , the two small internal Sinfonie with trumpets (and trombone and timpani) of the same oratorio and three Corelli concertos which had some of their movements “enriched” with 2 to 4 trumpet parts. Finally, a 5-part Muffat's suite was also included in the program. The latter was rearranged in the form of a concerto grosso by means of modifying its original instrumentation according to Muffat's instructions. 70 In the three Corelli's concertos presented, I wanted to experiment with slightly different procedures and possibilities.
In Concerto Opus 6 n.1, I stuck to what seems to have been the most common practice of having two trumpets on top of a string band, and I added them very much following Handel’s La Resurrezione's example.
In Concerto Opus 6 n.7, I followed very much the same procedure. However, the beginning of the first Allegro in 3/4 provided me with an excellent opportunity to experiment for the substitution of the concertino violins with the trumpets, as indirectly suggested by the studies of Förster and Allsop. 71 The first 8 bars of this Allegro present a simple ascending D major chord played alternatively by the two solo instruments, with no passing notes or anything particularly virtuosic. Furthermore, the entrance of the Concerto Grosso is interrupting these figures quite abruptly and adds new virtuosic material making it easy to revert to the original instrumentation and to start integrating the trumpets in a more “ Sinfonia- like” style. As a result, this substitution did not imply any tonal transposition nor a real reworking of the movement which could be preserved in its entirety until the final interrupted cadence.
In Concerto Opus 6 n.4, finally, I have been experimenting on how to add more than two trumpets. After analysing the score, I thought that while the beginning of this concerto was allowing me to easily integrate 3 trumpets, the very last movement of it was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to try recreating the soundscape of Corelli's Sinfonia strepitosa con 4 trombe . Indeed, its simple harmonic structure, its steady rhythm and, last but not least, its extremely extrovert and exciting affect, allowed me to write 4 trumpet parts that fit well on top of the original score. In this concerto, I also experimented with using the trombone together with the basses. The presence of this instrument in the Sinfonie is controversial. While the trombone appears relatively often in the documents before 1685, it tends to be less and less present afterwards. 72 In regard to Corelli, Spitzer and Zaslaw affirm that "trombones appear on Corelli's playlist only rarely". 73 Overall, there is no concrete evidence for the trombone playing with the trumpets in the Roman Sinfonie, and a specific part in the scores never appears. However, the picture we have of the use of this instrument might be a little blurred by the fact that sometimes the trombone was called “tromba”, hence, documents mentioning trumpets might occasionally mean trombones as well. Furthermore, trombones were regularly present and active in Rome as members of the “Concerto Capitolino”, a wind band at the service of the town regularly performing at official events. 74 For all these reasons, the participation of trombones in the Sinfonie might have been more common than what we think nowadays.
There has been one more experiment that I was able to carry out during this orchestral production. As we have seen, with the only exception of the Sinfonia e Introduzione of the Santa Beatrice d'Este, all Corelli's Sinfonie are lost: their scores, their violin and basso continuo parts, and their trumpet parts. But what about if the latter never existed? It is common knowledge in the HIPP – broadening now the perspective of our speculations - that some aspects of the old performances are not documented in detail by musical sources because they were left to the players – i.e., they were improvised. In a not completely unlikely scenario, a particularly appreciated strings-only Sinfonia could have been reused in the frame of an event in which the trumpets were available. I was then curious to explore what could happen if, confronted with a score of a Sinfonia for strings only, the trumpets were to be added without a specific part written for them, and they were asked to improvise their playing.
There is abundant evidence about the improvisatory skills of the trumpet players at the time, and specific sources giving instructions on how to perform a multi voice piece starting from a single given part, do exist. 75 Admittedly, and in most fields, nowadays such improvisatory skills are less developed than they used to be. However, I decided to challenge my trumpet players by giving them the score of a Muffat's Gigue that we were playing rearranged in a concerto grosso form, and to ask them to improvise - in the places that seemed most appropriate to them - a few interventions shaped on the examples of the Corelli concertos that we were rehearsing. After a few attempts, and a bit of co-working, a more than plausible version took form.