Stylus Phantasticus - Dietrich Buxtehude - Ciaccona: Il mondo che gira (2004)

A disc that includes just three-and-a-half minutes’ worth of the delectable Maria Cristina Kiehr sounds like tantalization taken a step too far. Yet, as so often with Alpha, a theme lies behind this apparently disparate collection, although you’d have to be a Buxtehude scholar to spot it from the list of contents. The clue is in the word “Ciaconna” in the disc’s title, “Ciaccona: il mondo che gira.” Got there yet? Well, the answer is that all these works include an ostinato, or repeated bass pattern. Much beloved of 17th-century composers, half the fascination of the ostinato bass is its paradoxical quality. By definition a device characterized by rigidity, its obsessive stability makes it the ideal structural foundation on which to build music of a virtuosic or, in some instances, fantastic nature, as happens here in the second part of the Sonata for violin and viola da gamba, BuxWV 272, where the increasingly exuberant solo parts work to a climax of the utmost virtuosity. By the same token, the ostinato can provide a calm reiterative background, a sense of balance and poise to music of great lyrical beauty, as can be heard here in the D-Minor Sonata, also for violin and gamba, by Dietrich Becker (1623–1679), a native of Hamburg, trained as an organist, but also an eminent violinist who composed a substantial body of music featuring that instrument.
In vocal music, bass patterns could be used to both expressive, and metaphorical purpose; it is no coincidence that most of the great laments of the 17th century were built on descending chromatic bass patterns. Both the sacred concertos here are entirely founded on ostinatos, in the case of Herr, wenn ich nur dich hab stressing the text’s rock-solid faith in God’s powers of consolation. Quemadmodum takes as its starting point the well-known yearning words of Psalm 42, “As pants the hart,” the whole of the long text articulated by a two-bar chaconne bass that gives the work a cumulative power ultimately rising to a climax in the final words of fulfilled joy. Like Kiehr’s performance of BuxWV38, it is very well and perceptively sung by bass Victor Torres (it was written for tenor) at a markedly quicker tempo than that taken by Charles Daniels on the Chandos disc of cantatas also reviewed in this issue.
Stylus Fantasticus brings to all this music a sense of musicianship that conveys total immersion, exuding the sheer pleasure of making music together. There is an excitability, a rare sense of occasion throughout that sweeps the listener along with the performers. This is not a cool, northern European Buxtehude we encounter here, but a composer living for the moment, living it passionately. That is not to say that the ensemble is not capable of refined poise, too, and there are passages of slower-moving music that spellbind the listener in a near timeless world of reflection. Just occasionally sheer enthusiasm can run away with the performers, particularly first violinist Pablo Valetti, whose fierce tremolandos at the start of the Adagio of BuxWV 272 are startlingly anachronistic. Purists will doubtless also raise an eyebrow at the idea of two theorbos and a harp being employed, an excessively rich continuo group. But such caveats pale into insignificance in the context of immensely rewarding and enlivening performances that cast fresh light on Buxtehude’s marvelously inventive music. -- Brian Robins