Benjamin Alard JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH The Complete Works for Keyboard 2 - Part 2

 

THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR KEYBOARD 2 - PART 2

Benjamin Alard JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH The Complete Works for Keyboard 2 - Part 1

 

THE COMPLETE WORKS FOR KEYBOARD 2 - PART 1

 

Griet De Geyter / Il Gardellino STILLE KLAGEN

 

STILLE KLAGEN

 

Maarten Engeltjes / PRJCT Amsterdam / Andreas Wolf NICHT MEHR HIER

NICHT MEHR HIER

Benjamin Alard JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH The Complete Works for Keyboard 2

In 1700, the 15-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach left behind his native Thuringia and travelled to Luneberg, in the north of Germany, where he studied, sang, developed his talents on the organ and made the acquaintance of some of the leading musical figures of the day. Hamburg was close enough that he could visit there, too, with its opera house and cosmopolitan musical life. French Huguenot composers, fleeing religious strife, had brought the latest keyboard fashions to the region, which he absorbed through his encounters with Georg Böhm. And the local musical culture meant steady exposure to Pachelbel, Buxtehude and Reincken.

Benjamin Alard continues his revelatory complete keyboard works series with four discs that explore this new milieu, which had such a powerful impact on Bach’s musical style. ‘Towards the North’, the second instalment of this beautifully played and produced series, explores the years 1705 08; and like the first it includes music not just by Bach but by the composers who influenced him. So we have a steady, sensible reading of Reincken’s magisterial chorale fantasy An Wasser Flüssen Babylon, a theme on which Bach would extemporise a legendary improvisation years later, when he was a master of equal standing to his aged predecessor.

The works of Bach in this period are, like those heard on the first volume, a motley assemblage, reflecting his growing skill, his absorptive talent, his occasional clumsy efforts and his nascent mastery, which one hears in the early toccatas included on the fourth and last disc of the set.

One of the great pleasures of these discs, beyond Alard’s smooth renditions and clarifying fingerwork, is his choice of instruments, in particular a claviorganum built in 2009 10. The combination of the harpsichord’s sharp ictus and the organ’s mellow and sustained tone gives his renditions of early chorale arrangements both linear fluidity and tonal richness, a sharply etched chamber-music sound that fits their four-part texture perfectly. The soprano Gerlinde Sämann sings the chorale lines with simplicity and a pleasant tone, underlying the musical source material and adding to the chamber-music fullness of the presentation.

Alard’s playing is rhythmically free, fleet and unpretentious, and, once again – even if this collection feels a bit like preparatory material for the main event to come – it leaves one eagerly anticipating Alard’s arrival at Bach’s second Weimar period, with its explosion of keyboard riches. (Philip Kennicott / Gramophone)

La Rêveuse / Florence Bolton / Benjamin Perrot DIETRICH BUXTEHUDE Sonates en trio - Manuscrits d'Uppsala

During the late 1600s, when Dieterich Buxtehude was organist of the Marienkirche in Lübeck, the town council received a wonderful letter of application from one of the city’s amateur musicians, offering his musical services. The instruments he could play in ‘a fitting manner’ were the violin, viola da gamba, violone, recorders, cornett, dulcian and ‘all manner of wind instruments’, plus the trombone and bass trombone. ‘If necessary’, he concluded, ‘I can cope with keyboard and vocal music.’

No wonder then that the stylus fantasticus of the time reached its peak under Buxtehude’s pen, because clearly even the amateur musicians in his city would have been well capable of getting their fingers around wherever his invention took him, and the intellectual energy and variety of the Lübeck environment is almost palpable in La Rêveuse’s programme of violin and viola da gamba trio sonatas. For starters, in the ensemble’s attitude to programming, because they haven’t just stuck to Buxtehude’s two published collections of sonatas but instead have raided the Uppsala University Library in Sweden for manuscripts of three sonatas he sent to an organist and court director friend in Stockholm. They’ve thrown in some context too, in the form of Becker’s Hamburg-written Sonata in D for violin and viol, and an anonymous-but-likely-to be-Lübeck-linked viol sonata from Oxford’s Bodleian Library, which also only exists in manuscript form.

This scholarly contextual thinking and energy has also thoroughly pervaded the actual performances. Overall there’s a real sense of music happening right now; also of intellectual nimbleness. Then there’s the continuo section’s easy movement, and the nuanced, dancing lilt from Stephan Dudermel on the violin and Florence Bolton on the viola da gamba. In fact, listening to this album feels rather like being delightfully, playfully – and thoroughly willingly – seduced. (Charlotte Gardner / Gramophone)

Ensemble Stravaganza ABENDMUSIKEN

From the middle of the sixteenth century the reputation for excellence of the composers of Northern Germany was well established. Given dynamism by commercial exchanges thanks to the bustling activity of the port of Hamburg notably, the cities of the Hanseatic League welcomed many foreign workers, their customs inspiring the artistes of the Germanic tradition. At the end of the seventeenth century, Hamburg was a free city sheltered from war, a refuge for artistes and for great fortunes. It was then the most cosmopolitan city in Germany and its population included a great number of merchants, bankers, diplomats and senators, so many men who were rich and who had the time necessary for enjoying music and for encouraging this flourishing art.
As close friends, Johann Adam Reinken, Dietrich Buxtehude – both admired by Bach – and Johann Theile belonged to the circle of contrapuntists of Northern Germany, finding inspiration, however, in the monodic stile nuovo of Italy, championing the idea that music should be at the service of the drama. This musical circle, both professional and friendly, met frequently at Abendmusiken, or musical evenings, created in 1646 in Lübeck by Franz Tunder, organist of the Marienkirche who was to be succeeded by Buxtehude. Organists, great improvisors, the music of the four composers of this programme often comprises suites of short movements in each of which occur identical or related harmonic and melodic elements, characteristics of improvisation and peculiar to the stylus phantasticus, a musical movement dear to composers of this period.

Arcangelo / Jonathan Cohen BUXTEHUDE Trio Sonatas Op. 1

For this recording of music by Buxtehude, Jonathan Cohen, founder of the ensemble Arcangelo, is joined by a distinguished trio, including two regulars on the Alpha label, Sophie Gent and Thomas Dunford, alongside the gambist Jonathan Manson. Although Dietrich Buxtehude is famous above all for his organ music and cantatas, and for the long journey the young Bach undertook to meet him, his chamber music is virtually unknown. In the mid-1690s, at the height of his fame, Buxtehude published two collections in rapid succession, each comprising seven sonatas for violin, viola da gamba and basso continuo. It is the works of the first collection (1694) – designated Opus 1 in the print – that Arcangelo has recorded here. These sonatas are characterised by pronounced experimental features in both the scoring and the handling of the instruments.