Expert: Stephen Levine - 4/19/2008

Question
I was hoping you would please identify this music from a television show. This show had two types of background music: music written specifically for the show and genuine classical music.  This is one of the genuine classical pieces. (I verified that with the person who did the official soundtrack for the series -- a soundtrack which, unfortunately for me, only included the music written for the show.)

I was initially told it was a Beethoven string quartet, but I know it's not that.  It's not a string quartet and I have my doubts that it's Beethoven. I have spent many hours going through music samples on Amazon.com and downloading pieces from classicalarchives and by now I have listened (in whole or in part) to a few thousand movements trying to identify this music with no luck.

I asked another expert on this site and posted on the classicalarchives forum but no one can recognize it.

I've loaded the clip of the music on youtube so you can hear it.(Just ignore the picture, I had to stick something in there to get it to save as a wmv file for youtube.) The clip is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1fqpeyXaww  The music begins about 10 seconds into the clip.

If you don't recognize the music, anything you could please tell me about could be helpful such as what composer you think it is (or isn't), period, etc. I'm particularly interested in knowing what key it's in as that could help me narrow my search.

Thanks for any help you can give.

Answer
i don't know this specific piece but i can tell you categorically it is not beethoven..it is baroque...probably a bach or handel piece...maybe one of the handel concerti grossi which if you want to research are opus 3 and opus 6...12 in each group...and therefore written between 1700 and 1750...it could perhaps be vivaldi but it sounds a little too heavyweight for that..good luck
steve