Andrea Bacchetti follows his album of sonatas by Baldassarre Galuppi with another little-performed 18th century Venetian, Benedetto Marcello, whose work has a surprisingly modern character. The "Sonata III", for instance, opens with a sequence in which the right hand plays the same note 48 times in rapid succession, while the left cycles quadruplets around it – the kind of gambit you'd expect from a Cage or Feldman, but hardly from a contemporary of Vivaldi. Marcello is said to have once fallen into a grave that opened beneath him, a trauma perhaps responsible for the austere, near-spiritual logic of pieces such as the "Sonata V", where the absence of frills prefigures the enigmatic miniatures of Erik Satie.

Baldassare Galuppi was a Venetian composer, mainly noted for his large output in opera and his collaborations with Goldoni who wrote many a libretto for him, some of which that were re-used by subsequent composers (like Il Mondo della Luna and Haydn). His dates - 1706 -1785 - make him part of a later generation than Bach, Vivaldi, Haendel and Scarlatti but of an older one than Haydn and Mozart, and roughly a contemporary of Bach's two eldest sons - Wilhelm-Friedemann and Carl-Philipp-Emmanuel. The Sonatas featured here are performed in a new edition from the original sources (usually contemporary copies rather than original manuscripts) by Mario Marcarini (who wrote the liner notes) and pianist Andrea Bacchetti.