Giuseppe Sammartini (also known as San Martini) 1693 – 1750, was an Italian composer and oboist during the late Baroque and early Classical era. He was born in Milan, the son of a French emigrant oboist called Alexis Saint­ Martin (or Alessio S. Martino). By 1711 he had become the first oboist of the Milan Opera and had begun to compose both instrumental and vocal music. The celebrated flautist Johann Joachim Quantz, visiting Milan in 1726, singled his oboe playing out for praise and classed him as a performer with violinists of the rank of Vivaldi.

He seems to have arrived in England in 1729, when he first appears in the concert advertisements of the time, and soon afterwards joined the orchestra of the King’s Theatre in The Haymarket. Handel wrote an important oboe part for him in Arminio (1737). Later he became a member of the household of Frederick, Prince of Wales — as Sir John Hawkins tells us, “upon the footing of a domestic, and [was] appointed master or director of the chamber music to his Royal Highness”. For Frederick he composed dance music and masques, including a setting of Congreve’s Judgement of Paris. According to Hawkins, “as a performer on the hautboy, [San] Martini was undoubtedly the greatest that the world has ever known …. by great study and application, and by some peculiar management of the reed, he contrived to produce such a tone as approached the nearest to that of the human voice of any we know”.1

As an oboist at the Opera, Sammartini would have had to double on recorder and transverse flute as the occasion demanded. Although he does not seem to have published any recorder music himself — his twelve trio sonatas for two treble recorders or violins and basso continuo were “date in luce” by his colleague Francesco Barsanti — an excellent, and now well-known, concerto for the fifth flute (descant recorder) survives in manuscript in Sweden.2 His playing of these alternative instruments is confirmed by another manuscript, thus far not exploited in modern editions, of no fewer than 27 sonatas for a melody instrument and basso continuo, of which 7 are for oboe, 4 for flute, 14 for treble recorder and 2 for violin, in the hands of various copyists.