Risky Business

Saturday, October 26, First Parish of Sudbury
Sunday, October 27, Old South Church, Boston and Online

Trio Sonata in C Major for two violins, cello, and continuo Dieterich Buxtehude (c. 1637 – 1707)
Adagio • Allegro • Adagio • Allegro • 
Adagio • Allegro • Adagio • Presto • Adagio

Sonata in B Minor for traverso and continuo, op. 1, no. 6 Jakob Friedrich Kleinknecht (1722 – 1794)
Adagio 
Allegro smanioso
Presto

Trio Sonata in G Major for traverso, violin, and continuo Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708 – c. 1763)
Allegro moderato 
Recitativ (Grave) — Arioso (Andantino)
Allegro

Sonata no. 5 in E Minor for violin and continuo Johann Jakob Walther (c. 1650 – 1717)
Aria [con variazioni] 

Trio Sonata in D Minor for traverso, viola, and continuo, GWV 207 Christoph Graupner (1683 – 1760)
Senz’ acceleranza 
Largo
Allegro ma non presto

Quintet in A Minor Johann Gottlieb Graun or Carl Heinrich Graun (1702/1703 – 1771) (1704-1759)
Amabile 
Allegro non tanto
Allegro alla Siciliano
 

Suzanne Stumpf, traverso
Sarah Darling, violin and viola; Jesse Irons, violin
Daniel Ryan, cello; Kelly Savage, harpsichord

These concerts are supported, in part, by grants from
the Sudbury Cultural Council and the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency.
The Sudbury perfomance is co-presented by the Sudbury Historical Society.

Program Notes

This program presents chamber works by German Baroque composers who were at the forefront of stylistic trends of their times. Our selections run the gamut of evolving sonata forms and the rhapsodic stylus fantasticus of the earlier composers Buxtehude and Walther, to the emotionally-charged writing in the revolutionary Empfindsamer and Galant styles of the late Baroque composers Kleinknecht, Janitsch, and Graun, with the incomparable originality of Graupner falling in between. 

Dieterich Buxtehude was a Danish composer and organist who spent most of his career in the city of Lübeck where he organized a series of evening concerts that attracted musicians from far and wide. Such was his fame that in 1705 Johann Sebastian Bach walked over 250 miles to absorb the musical culture Buxtehude led in that city. Although most of Buxtehude’s surviving output is in the genres of organ music and sacred vocal music, a small amount of chamber music exists. His Trio Sonata in C Major is in the multi-movement format of the early Italian style, with short and contrasting movements flowing in continuous succession. One of these movements is for solo violin and is freely composed in an improvisatory style. This stylus fantasticus was a hallmark of his organ writing and prevalent with many of his North German contemporaries. 

Relatively little is known about Jakob Fried-erich Kleinknecht’s life. He grew up in a musical family, gained proficiency on the flute and violin, and eventually became Kapellmeister for the Chapel at Bayreuth (which moved later to Ansbach). Kleinknecht’s Sonata in B Minor is an astonishing work for the way it marries Baroque counterpoint to the dramatic emotional contrasts of the Empfindsamer Stil. The sharing of the flute’s virtuosic melodic material in the bass is noteworthy as well as Kleinknecht’s riveting, dramatic storytelling, with arresting interruptions and changes of character. 

Johann Jakob Walther absorbed the Italian style directly through his time in Florence, Italy, from about 1670 until 1673. He later served at the courts of Dresden and Mainz. Along with Biber, Walther was among the most virtuosic violinists of the period. The 19th-century music historian Fétis dubbed him the Paganini of his century. His surviving violin music consists of suites and freely organized sonatas. The sonata heard on this program is a series of variations on a repeating bass line. Here Walther’s considerable technique is revealed with frequent use of double stops in contrapuntal imitation, virtuoso passagework, and imitation of an organ tremolo.

Johann Gottlieb Janitsch was born in Schweid-nitz (now Swidnica, Poland), but spent most of his professional life as a double bass player and composer in the service of Frederick the Great. Janitsch was most well-known as a composer of quartets that made use of colorful instrumental combinations. The second movement of his Trio Sonata in G Major (one of the recovered works in the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection), has a seemingly unprecedented structure for instrumental music: the recitative—a technique reserved for delivering the story line of vocal works. With the score for that movement incomplete, some reconstruction was needed, leading us to believe that our performances may be a regional premiere of the work. The outer movements show the Galant focus on charming melodies, use of the ubiquitous two-note “sigh” gesture, and bantering exchanges of melodic motifs. 

Christoph Graupner spent most of his career as Kapellmeister at the court of Darmstadt. An extremely prolific composer, he wrote in a variety of genres, including over 1,000 cantatas and hundreds of instrumental works. His Trio Sonata in  D Minor for flute, viola d’amore (performed in these concerts on viola), and continuo is one of several he composed for that combination. The unusual designation of its first movement, senz’  acceleranza, may possibly suggest tempo restraint in anticipation of the increasingly faster figurations employed as the movement progresses. The work is written in an impressively dense contrapuntal style making frequent use of sequences that, in the final movement, serve to build an exciting conclusion. 

There is much mystery surrounding the Quintet in A Minor by Graun. The work survives in a beautifully-penned manuscript also found in the Berlin Sing-Akademie collection. Conflicting sources attribute the work to either Johann Gottlieb or his brother Carl Heinrich Graun. It is not listed in Johann Gottlieb’s thematic catalog and may even be one of the two quintets listed in Carl Heinrich’s catalog. The instrumentation itself is also mysterious as the flute part falls out of the range of the instrument, there are notations indicating oboe in the violin part, and there exists a  viola da gamba part as an alternative to the viola. Whatever the authorship or instrumentation of this work, it is a groundbreaking piece that is on the stylistic cusp of the early Classical period. Thematic material is largely shared and alternated among three groups of instruments: the flute and violin; the harpsichord’s right hand when playing in thirds; and the extraordinarily virtuosic viola part often written in thirds performed by double stops. These three entities pass the material through a succession of melodic and harmonic progressions in a format that predates the mature Classical Sonata Allegro form with no less a sense of scale and drama.                

 —Daniel Ryan and Suzanne Stumpf