Trio Settecento, the “superlative Chicago-based early music ensemble” (Gramophone) presents Italian Baroque composer Francesco Maria Veracini’s monumental Op.2 Sonate Accademiche for violin and continuo. It’s a cosmopolitan collection of 12 sonatas of breath-taking scope and pan-European influences - a set of sonatas unlike any other of the era. Veracini’s Sonate Accedemiche is both an homage to his fellow-countryman Arcangelo Corelli and an original masterpiece in its own right.

Billboard chart-topping violinist Rachel Barton Pine, “one of the rare mainstream performers with a total grasp of Baroque style and embellishment” (Fanfare) and her colleagues in Trio Settecento, cellist John Mark Rozendaal and harpsichordist David Schrader, bring their “refreshing, life-enhancing Baroque playing” (Chicago Tribune) to these sonatas infused with melodies imported from Scotland, Dalmatia, Poland, the Canary Islands and rural France.

One of the greatest violin virtuosos of his era, Veracini (1690–1768) loved to entertain and dazzle audiences with pyrotechnical playing. This impulse is vividly apparent in the violin parts of the Sonate Accedemiche and in Pine’s passionate and authoritative interpretations.