Programme — Allegro, Adagio, Tempo di Minuetto

Sonata in C major HobVI/6 (c 1766-68)

arranged for cello and piano by Alfredo Piatti (1822-1901)

Allegro

Adagio

Tempo di Minuetto

Universally admired in his day - and, incidentally, the last virtuoso cellist to play without an endpin - Alfredo Piatti inspired one of the great might-have-beens of musical history. Mendelssohn, who had been much impressed by Piatti’s playing in a Philharmonic concert he had conducted in London in 1844, wrote at least part of a Cello Concerto for him three years later but, sadly, lost the manuscript and never attempted to reconstruct it. The cellist was apparently not enormously disappointed, since what he had seen of the work had convinced him that “it did not come up to the Violin Concerto by a long way.” Besides, he was quite capable of writing cello concertos himself and, indeed, he did complete two of them, together with a Concertino, four Sonatas and and twelve solo Caprices.

Piatti was also skilled in making cello arrangements of music written by other composers for other instruments. How he happened to come across Haydn’s six very obscure duo Sonatas for violin and viola - possibly written in the late 1760s for the Esterháza violinist Luigi Tomasini and the composer himself - and why he chose No.6 in C major in preference to the others, it is impossible to say. Anyway, he made a thoroughly professional arrangement, converting the original violin part into a busily effective cello part and virtually creating a piano accompaniment from the somewhat rudimentary viola part. Of the three movements - a sonata-form Allegro characteristically based on only one main theme, a lovely C minor Adagio in siciliano rhythm ending with a cello cadenza, and a cheerful Minuet - the last seems to have proved to be most popular. Certainly, there was enough demand for the Minuet to cause Piatti’s publisher to issue it as a separate piece.