Dietrich Buxtehude's chamber music, more modest in scope than his towering organ works, was meant to serve the needs of North Germany's growing muncipal music scenes of the late seventeenth century. The concerts for which these sonatas for violin, gamba, and cembalo -- not really trio sonatas in the Italian sense -- were written were the ancestors of true public concerts: gatherings of prosperous merchants whose Protestant tastes ran toward the serious and the rhetorically high-flown. The success of the enterprise is shown by the fact that Buxtehude had his Op. 1 set of sonatas printed at his own expense, but for these a publisher picked up the tab. Some of Buxtehude's music sounds like early
Bach, but these sonatas not so much. From the track list they may look as though they're in typical three- or four-movement sonata patterns, but that's not really an accurate impression: they follow the model of earlier seventeenth century Italian sonatas, with each movement consisting of several smaller sections. To the pattern, superseded by the time
Bach came along, Buxtehude added a liberal dose of the stylus phantasticus, interpreted with the composer's characteristically vigorous imagination. Consider the Sonata V in A major, BuxWV 263, which unexpectedly launches into a virtuoso episode for the violin. The second movement is even marked "solo" (the continuo accompaniment continues), with a variety of multiple-stop theatrics, and the solo continues into the third and fourth movements in varying modes; the third movement is in the old concitato style. Plowing through the six sonatas in order might not seem to be terribly imaginative programming, but the variety of these works, no two of which follow a pattern in overall shape or expression, holds the listener's interest. The readings by the new Italian trio calling itself
L'Estravagante are superb, combining an intimate quality appropriate to the scale of the music with an appreciation of Buxtehude's free spirit. The Super Audio sound (realized here on a good conventional stereo) is impressively clear, but the gamba tends to get short shrift compared with the violin. The booklet notes are informative but needed editorial work that would have caught such errors as the assertion that Buxtehude's predecessor
Reinken lived from 1623 to 1772.