Buxtehude: Sonata in C major, BuxWV266

Having been born half a century after Heinrich Schutz, the ‘father of German musicians’ and a little less than half a century before J. S. Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude was a living link between the founder of Protestant Baroque music and its greatest master. This set of six sonatas without opus numbers incorporates all the principal elements in the sonata art of the Lubeck master; the serious yet daringly expressive harmony of his majestic slow movements, masterful fugal technique, melodious and graceful dance movements, and technical virtuosity in the many solo movements.

This ‘themed’ programme by Da Pacem derives from a series of concerts devoted to Bach’s infamous journey on foot to hear Buxtehude play. Did he have leave of absence from his employers? Did the four month absence change his style for ever?

Buxtehude achieved a staggering synthesis of the polyphonic, numerical and rhetorical traditions of his predecessors with a very personal poetry, taking care to make his music accessible to everyone, from the specialist to the layman. It is not surprising that Bach took him as his model.

Opera Omnia Xll is the latest release in the acclaimed cycle of the complete works of Dieterich Buxtehude featuring the award winning combination of renowned early music specialist Ton Koopman and the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra. It is the first volume to be devoted to the composer’s lesser-known but highly-rewarding chamber music and concentrates on sonatas from manuscript sources.

Ton Koopman is one of the world’s foremost early music specialists and directors, and his recording of the complete Bach Cantatas on Challenge Classics received worldwide acclaim. In recent years he has undertaken the daunting task of recording all of the music of his compatriot, the early baroque composer Dieterich Buxtehude. As president of the International Dieterich Buxtehude Society, Ton Koopman is considered to be one of the world’s leading authorities on his music. Amongst a string of accolades for previous recordings in the series Opera Omnia X, (CC72249), was a Gramophone “Editor’s Choice” Dieterich Buxtehude’s chamber works today count among the least known of his compositions. They were already forgotten soon after 1700, despite the fact that two thirds of Buxtehude’s chamber sonatas, unlike any other category in the composer’s creative output, were published during his lifetime. The publication of sonatas indicates that there was a market for this repertoire in the later 17th century. Moreover, the publication of two sets of such works suggests that the fame of the Lübeck master and the success of the first set must have created the demand for a second. However, the primary reason for these works getting out of fashion by the time of Buxtehude’s death was their unconventional instrumental scoring and, more importantly, the triumphant rise of the modern Italian trio sonata by Corelli, Albinoni, and others in the early 18th century.

Stylus Phantasticus is a style of opposites: freely flowing expressive melodies in which garish dissonances can charge the order of Baroque forms with extreme tension, opening up fascinating worlds of sound that one would hardly expect in the North German Baroque. Ornamentation and phrasing with great momentum are demanded here and that is where this ensemble is in its element.

Reinken in Hamburg and Buxtehude in Lübeck dominated musical life in North Germany for some 40 years.Their instrumental music for violins, viol and continuo is a model of the style full of contrasts and surprises known as the 'stylus phantasticus', defined by Mattheson as an art of imagination and freedom, rhetoric and vocality.