Allegro by Giovanni Battista Pescetti

Allegro by Giovanni Battista Pescetti

For my first performance piece I performed the fourth movement from

Sonata Number 8 called Allegro by Giovanni Battista Pescetti.

Giovanni Pescetti (1704-1766) was an Italian Musician who found

employment in Venice and London, mainly as a composer of operas but

also as a harpsichord player.

The melody in Allegro is written following a strict pattern of mainly

semiquavers. It uses quavers as an introductory passage to the main

phrases which are written in semiquavers. This is relative to the

baroque period of which this music was written.

The piece is opened with five quavers in step descending, this is then

imitated by the left hand which does the same thing an octave lower.

After this two bar introduction the right hand plays a bar of

semiquavers, again imitated by the left hand a bar afterwards playing

the same thing an octave lower. After this, the piece begins to take

shape and Pescetti lays out the structure that the remainder of

Allegro will follow. This is a strict pattern of semiquavers playing

the melody with the left hand mainly playing quavers to balance them.

There are a number of perfect cadences in the piece, these give the

impression that the piece has ended. The first of these can be found

just fourteen bars into the piece. Although the piece is in the key of

C, everything up until the first perfect cadence is written in G

major, as every F is sharpened so therefore the chord at the perfect

cadence is a G major chord (first inversion.)

The piece then continues in the same way that it started, the left

hand imitates the right hand for four bars and then continues in G

major following the pattern of a full bar of semi quavers in the right

hand. For the main body of the piece, the left hand consists of two

quavers and a crotchet in a bar, or a full bar of quavers, or one

crotchet and one quaver in a bar.

In bar 23, again there is a key change from G major, to the relative