Bergen Barokk - Bertouch: Trio Sonatas (2005) CD-Rip

This is music from Norway, from Bergen specifically, written in the early eighteenth century. Composer Georg von Bertouch has an interesting biography; a German-born musician of French extraction, he was also a military leader who participated in 22 battles in Denmark (of which Norway was a part), Germany, and France. A bit older than Bach and Telemann, and geographically even farther removed from the fonts of Italian innovation, he did not (on the evidence of the music here) engage with Vivaldi or with Telemann's galant styles. Instead, the keyboard pieces presented here are modest examples of French style, and the trio sonatas, to which the bulk of the album is devoted, are modeled on those of Corelli, with elegant two-part writing featuring rather obsessive use of sequences and long chains of harmonic suspensions. The album's interest lies not only in its rediscovery of a forgotten composer but also in the variety of ways the trio sonatas are presented. Recorder player and annotator Frode Thorsen identifies four possible modes of playing a trio sonata: with two similar melody instruments, with two different ones, with one melody instrument and keyboard part incorporating the second melody line, and on an organ or harpsichord by itself (as with Bach's trio sonatas for organ). The program gives examples of all four, resulting in an unusually varied sonic palette and a program that might easily have been given by a virtuoso complement of musicians at a noble establishment in the eighteenth century. The music isn't brilliantly compelling, and Thorsen's recorder doesn't always have the smooth organ-like quality that's desirable, but this disc offers enjoyable listening for anyone from commuters to Baroque specialists.