2 Violins and 1 Guitar, Vol. 2

The Trio Sonata, an instrumental composition generally demanding the services of four players reading from three part-books, assumed enormous importance in Baroque music, developing from its earlier beginnings at the start of the seventeenth century to a later flowering in the work of Handel, Vivaldi and Bach, after the achievements of Arcangelo Corelli in the form. Instrumentation of the trio sonata, possibly for commercial reasons, allowed some freedom of choice. Nevertheless the most frequently found arrangement became that for two violins and cello, with a harpsichord or other chordal instrument to fill out the harmony. Although some composers tended to compromise in matters of form, trio sonatas were more often than not either in the form of the Sonata da chiesa, or Church Sonata, with a sequence of four movements, slow, fast, slow, fast, the quicker movements fugal in character, or in the form of the Sonata da camera, or Cha