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Opera Omnia XIII - Chamber music vol. 2
Dieterich Buxtehude

Opera Omnia XIII - Chamber music vol. 2

Ton Koopman & Members of Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra

Label: Challenge Classics
Format: CD
Barcode: 0608917225228
barcode
Catalog number: CC 72252
Releasedate: 04-03-11
18th-century Hamburg writer Johann Mattheson about the “stylus fantasticus,”: “this style is the most free and unrestrained manner of composing, singing, and playing that one can imagine, for one hits first on this idea and then upon that one, since one is bound neither to words nor to melody, only to harmony, so that the singer and player can display his skill.” This is exactly what Ton Koopman and his collegues do here, display their superb skills in the second volume of the Chamber Music of Buxtehude, his least knownd workd but all the more interesting!
  • Koopman won two Super Sonic Awards for his Haydn Organ CD and Opera Omnia XII, Chamber music vol.1, handed out by Pizzicato magazine in February 2011!
  • Koopman won the ECHO Klassik Award, for Buxtehude,Opera Omnia, Vocal Works III (CC72246)
  • Koopman won the Editor's Choice in Gramophone (september 2009) for Opera Omnia X- Organ Works, Vol.5 (CC72249)
  • In 2008 Ton Koopman won the BBC Music Award  for part 22 of the Bach-Cantata series. The jury says: ‘….with superb control of style and technique.’
  • Ton Koopman received an Edison for the entire Bach Cantata-series
  • In 2010, around Easter, Ton Koopman received a Golden Record for selling more than 10.000 records of the Matthäus Passion (J.S. Bach)
  • In 2010 Koopman has also released two Haydn CD's: Organconcertos and London Symphonies which were received very well by critics and music lovers
In the last decade of the 17th century, Dieterich Buxtehude published within a period of two years a group of fourteen instrumental chamber sonatas in two sets of seven each. Thereby, he contributed in a major way to a new and fashionable repertoire of trio sonatas that had originated in Italy after the middle of the century. Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), the Venetian composer, had played the main influence in spreading a new type of instrumental music north of the Alps. His works published in the 1660s and 70s were well known in the Hanseatic cities around the Baltic Sea. Lübeck, one of the principal music centers in Northern Europe, was no exception in this respect. Buxtehude, who served as organist of the St. Mary’s Church in Lübeck from 1668 until his death in 1707, picked up and integrated the modern Italian style early in the instrumental introductions to his sacred concertos and cantatas, but turned to instrumental chamber music only late in his life.

Every single sonata presents different solutions in regard to section sequences; no two pieces show the same pattern. In general, the fast sections prefer more or less elaborate polyphonic and fugal designs whereas the slow sections emphasize harmonic and expressive features. Sections are sometimes connected without interruption, sometimes separated by fermatas or double bars.  Towards the end of some phrases the violin makes use of double stops, in line with the overall virtuosic design of the sonatas. The compositional ideas pursued by the composer are based on the concept of the so-called “stylus fantasticus,” a manner favored in keyboard and soloist instrumental ensemble music of the late 17th-century in North Germany. According to the 18th-century Hamburg writer Johann Mattheson, “this style is the most free and unrestrained manner of composing, singing, and playing that one can imagine, for one hits first on this idea and then upon that one, since one is bound neither to words nor to melody, only to harmony, so that the singer and player can display his skill.”