Unico Wilhelm Van Wassenaer

Dutch diplomat and composer (2 November 1692, Delden, Overijssel – 9 November 1766, The Hague).

Unico Wilhelm Van Wassenaer (1692-1766), a Dutch nobleman, was famously the author of the “Concerti Armonici” long thought to have been by the Italian composer Giovanni Battista Pergolesi (1710-1736) (they were attributed back to their legitimate author only in 1980). Three sonatas for recorder and continuo were discovered only in 1992 (and recorded soon after) and, with the Concerti, are the only known works of Van Wassenaer. He may have been the author of Pergolesi’s Concerti, but, on the basis of these Sonatas, he wasn’t Pergolesi, and even less Vivaldi. The Sonatas are agreeable and valuable salon music, alternating the meditative/plangent and the more lively and dance-like, but never with the melodic or harmonic invention, the moving pathos in the Largos and the uplifting boistereousness in the Allegros, of the greats.