Description & Facts: GIUSEPPE TARTINI (1692 - 1770) Concerto for violin, strings, and basso continuo in A major D. 96 1. Allegro Performed by the Venice Baroque Orchestra Featuring Giuliano Carmignola, violin Directed by Andrea Marcon *Giuseppe Tartini was an Italian composer and violinist. Tartini was born in Piran, a town on the peninsula of Istria, in the Republic of Venice (now in Slovenia) to Gianantonio - native of Florence - and Caterina Zangrando, a descendant of one of the oldest aristocratic Piranian families. It appears Tartini's parents intended him to become a Franciscan friar, and in this way he received a basic musical training. He studied law at the University of Padua, where he became very good at fencing. After his father's death in 1710, he married Elisabetta Premazone, a woman his father would have disapproved of because of her lower social class and age difference. Unfortunately, Elisabetta was a favorite of the powerful Cardinal Giorgio Cornaro, who promptly charged Tartini with abduction. Tartini fled Padua to go to the monastery of St. Francis in Assisi, where he could escape prosecution; while there he took up playing the violin. There is a legend that when Giuseppe Tartini heard Francesco Maria Veracini's playing in 1716, he was so impressed by it and so dissatisfied with his own skill, that he fled to Ancona and locked himself away in a room to practice. Tartini's skill improved tremendously and in 1721 he was appointed Maestro di Capella at the Basilica di Sant