Giuseppe Maria Gioacchino Cambini (1746 - 1825) was an Italian composer and violinist. Information about his life is scarcely traceable. Louis-Gabriel Michaud, French scholar and François-Joseph Fétis, Belgian musicologist, drafted his biography, and Cambini himself speaks about his past in an article published in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804. However, all of these documents are full of errors and, therefore, need to be verified. It is not possible to confirm his personal data (only Fétis indicates his date of birth), nor his first studies. It is possible he is connected in some way to father Giovanni Battista Martini, and, more possibly to Filippo Manfredi, who was almost certainly his violin teacher. Fétis wrote about his unfortunate operatic debut in Naples in 1766, after which, during his return to Livorno by the sea, Cambini was kidnapped by pirates, who treated him terribly until his liberation by a Venetian aristocrat. The narration by the Belgian holds much resemblance to a story in the poetic periodical Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et critique, a fact that reduces its reliability. In the article found in Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in 1804, Cambini claims to have played the viola in a string quartet with Luigi Boccherini, Pietro Nardini and his teacher Manfredi for six months in 1767. If what he says is true, this quartet would represent the first formation of this emerging genre in Italy, if not in all of Europe. For many years, this information fostered a gigantic legend about the importance of the role of Cambini in defining the string quartet. Actually, he was one of the many (even if one of the most prolific) who, in the same period, contributed to the development of the genre.

There proves to be more that 600 examples of works by Cambini diffused throughout the world. More than 300 consist of printed editions, 250 are in manuscript copies, and about 100 are proven autographs. We have received only his instrumental music. In fact, only the music of Le Tuteur avare, written in collaboration with Pasquale Anfossi in 1787 (today preserved at the Bibliothèque Municipale de Lille) remains of his operas. For many years, there was a symphony that was considered to be his, but in reality it is by Joseph Martin Kraus for Boyer publishers. From 1784 to 1786, the publisher released the work of the then unknown Kraus under the name of the more famous Cambini in order to sell more copies, causing the misunderstanding of attribution, which was not resolved until 1989.

Source: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Cambini)

Although originally written for Wind Quintet, I created this Interpretation of the Sonata I in Bb Major for Flute & Piano.