This Andante is easily my favourite movement from all 6 of Guglielmi’s keyboard sonatas in op. 3, which I played through in their entirety (for the second time?) just a few days agos: there’s such a sweet and tranquil simplicity. It does sound rather musicbox-like when played on flute stops; I’m sure it’s rather more somber and dignified on the intended harpsichord.

Not a complicated piece at all, technically, but one whose structure allows for all sorts of creativity like playing with echo-dynamics and varying articulation.

Having scoured YouTube – and the wider world wide web — I believe these 6 sonatas have not been recorded in their entirety; I can only see 2–3 recordings of various other sonatas from op. 3 on YouTube.

My major deviations from the score (London: Robert Bremner, n.d.(ca.1770)) are:

• adding a trill to the second beat of bar 17 to match the trill written in the second beat of bar 20
• adding grace notes to the ends of the echo scale runs (bars 25 and 55)
• changing the grace notes in bars 53 (written) and 55 (my own addition) such that the grace note is the same as the preceding note, which follows the model set by the grace notes written in bars 13, 15, 18, 21, 23, 33, 39, 42, 43, 44, 45, 48, and 51. It is only bar 53 that breaks from this model by taking the grace note a major third up. It could be argued that making the grace note descend/settle onto the tonic in this last instance gives an air of finality — it is the end of the movement — and I think this would work if I hadn’t chosen to insert the (necessarily very short) grace note at bar 55. Since I did choose to have the grace note at bar 55, in order to have the echo voice more accurately mirror the main voice, it seemed intuitively better to have the grace note ascend, firstly to follow the model so well established throughout the movement but also to lift the music up to start those descending double stops that actually mark the end of the movement. In fact, this was so intuitive that I had played it in this modified way a number of times before I realised I was deviating from the score.

21 takes tonight: despite the simplicity of this piece there are a number of ways to trip up, including reading from a scan whose quality is just poor enough to be lacking in those almost-invisible cues that are so important to reading music quickly; the trills at bar 34 are rather devillish, and in fact the dense distribution of trills throughout the piece means careful fingering is required: avoiding the thumb in bar 1, for example; and noting that the ascending scale in bar 33 cannot be played with standard A-major scale fingering, lest it be the pinky that land on the high A, leaving nothing to trill on (or, alternatively, having to trill with thumb and index finger). My fingering for bars 33–34 involved landing on the high A on the thumb, starting the trill to B with the middle finger, and then replacing the thumb with the index finger.

I can’t help but wonder if the C/C# notation in bar 5 is a typo: intuitively it sounds better for the last C(#) to be a C♮.

Registration

Sampleset: Strassburg by Piotr Grabowski.

Very simply, the left hand is always on the Positiv; the right hand alternates between Positiv and Hauptwerk for dynamics. Harpsichord technique on a Baroque organ!

• Positiv:
  • Gedackt 8'
• Hauptwerk:
  • Gedeckt 8'
  • Gemshorn 8'
• Couplers
  • Positiv–Hauptwerk

There is an almost percussive (marimba) sound in this registration, I think due to the very prominent chiff in the Positiv’s Gedackt 8’, combined with the tracker action sound.