Dietrich
Buxtehude died in 1707 and event which will be commemorated
next year. This has given the Dutch keyboard player and conductor
Ton Koopman cause to start a complete recording of Buxtehude's
extant works. This will take in all of Buxtehude’s compositions
for keyboard including those without a pedal part. This aspect
of the oeuvre is generally thought to be neglected by modern
interpreters of baroque keyboard music. In fact the situation
isn't as bad as one might think. As far as I can remember
even in the vinyl era two complete recordings of Buxtehude's
harpsichord works were released. And more recently Mitzi
Meyerson, Lars Ulrik Mortensen and Rinaldo Alessandrini have
recorded a selection of the harpsichord music. But Buxtehude's
name appear only infrequently on harpsichord concert programmes.
And Glen Wilson is certainly right when he writes in the
booklet of this disc that "Buxtehude's large corpus
of brilliant organ music has overshadowed his equally impressive
vocal and instrumental music". The same could also have
been said of his harpsichord works. One can only hope that
the Buxtehude commemoration in 2007 is going to change all
that. After all the last Buxtehude year (1987) contributed
to the growing popularity of his chamber music and some vocal
works, in particular the cantata cycle Membra Jesu nostri.
This
disc of harpsichord music is a good starting point to get
acquainted with this part of Buxtehude's catalogue not that
it is represents a very large corpus although the music is
of high quality. It is rather surprising that none of it
was ever published during the composer’s lifetime, a fact
which two of Germany's most prominent writers about music
in the 18th century, Johann Mattheson and Johann Gottfried
Walther, deeply regretted. According to Glen Wilson Buxtehude's
pieces for harpsichord "seem at first glance rather
conventional. They are deceptively simple, like Scarlatti
or Mozart. It is hoped that this recording will contribute
to a re-evaluation of Buxtehude as one of the finest German
composers for the harpsichord of the seventeenth century,
the only one worthy of mention in the same breath with Froberger.
He did what Bach did half a century later: he took the forms
he saw around him, French suites, Italian toccatas and canzonas,
variation techniques from the German Sweelinck-school and
later on from Rome, and made them unmistakably his own."
This
disc contains pieces that reflect these different influences.
In his suites Buxtehude makes use of the 'style brisé' of
the French lute composers of the 17th century, which French
harpsichord composers adopted. The Suite in g minor follows
the French pattern in its sequence of four dances: allemande,
courante, sarabande and gigue. This disc contains another
suite, which can't be immediately recognized from its title:
the chorale partita 'Auf meinen lieben Gott' isn't like chorale
partitas by other German composers like Georg Böhm or - later
- Johann Sebastian Bach. The variations on the chorale are
written in the form of dances: the set starts with an allemande
and its 'double', and continues with a sarabande, a courante
and a gigue. A piece like this shows that there is no watershed
between music played in church and at home. This chorale
partita was probably first and foremost written to be played
on the harpsichord at home, but there is no reason why it
couldn't be played in church. And the use of sacred themes,
like hymn tunes, in harpsichord music wasn't uncommon: Buxtehude's
contemporary Georg Böhm composed several chorale partitas
for keyboard without pedal. These can be played both on harpsichord
and organ.
The
Italian style is represented by the Toccata in G which opens
this disc. And just like the Italian composers of keyboard
music Buxtehude isn't afraid of some pretty strong dissonances
here and there. The two preludes, on the other hand, are
typical examples of the German 'stylus phantasticus', the
features of which are frequent runs, sudden shifts in tempo
and rhythm and the alternation of imitative and free improvisatory
sections.
The
largest work on this disc is a set of variations on the Bergamasca,
although the subject isn't mentioned in its title. As Glen
Wilson writes, there are many similarities between these
variations and the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach. One
example of this is that the same subject, known in Germany
as 'Kraut und Rüben', is quoted in the Quodlibet from the
Goldberg Variations. Wilson believes that Bach here paid
homage to the master whom he admired and who had such a strong
influence on him.
Wilson
has made an interesting and representative choice from Buxtehude's
oeuvre. He uses a fine instrument, a copy of a Ruckers from
1626, built by Jan van Schevikhoven in Helsinki. The two
manuals are used to great effect to underline the contrasts
between sections. Some sections are played on the upper manual,
others on the lower, which is sometimes coupled with the
upper manual. This way dynamic contrasts can be created.
Wilson's style is strongly gestural and rhetorical, with
clear articulation. As a result this disc is a very eloquent
plea for the harpsichord music of Dietrich Buxtehude.
Johan van Veen
see also review by Paul Shoemaker
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Glen Wilson
(harpsichord) 
for
details
