VoM Reviews Repertoire on Latest Video Stream

One advantage of the summer is that I have to deal with fewer demands for my attention on Sundays. As a result, I am more likely have time for the weekly videos presented by Voices of Music as part of their Sunday Mornings at Ten series. Today’s offering was Episode 29 in the fourth season of these releases, each of which has its own YouTube Web page, which identifies the individual videos being selected. For this particular offering, there were nine such videos collected under the title Pool Party! 

I must confess that the title left me scratching my head, but it certainly did not interfere with my impressions of both the nine individual selections of the video accounts for each of the performances. The entire program was framed by two concertos by Antonio Vivaldi. Hanneke van Proosdij launched the entire event with her sopranino recorder. She was soloist in Vivaldi’s RV 443 concerto in C major. The audio was taken from a performance at the Berkeley Early Music Festival in June of 2016, but the visuals were provided by Stephen Malinowski.

Those that have followed this site for some time probably know that I have had a long-standing interest in Malinowski’s work. Sadly, I have not written about him since June of 2021, which happened to be when I completed my traversal of his animated visualizations of all of the preludes and fugues in Johann Sebastian Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier. His techniques enabled even the tone-deaf listener to appreciate the technical intricacies of Bach’s polyphony. In this case they were just as effective in reflecting the ongoing give-and-take between ensemble and soloist. Mind you, I have my own ways of appreciating the virtuosities of such a give-and-take performance; but Malinowski’s approach to visualization definitely left me with a smile on my face! I only wished that more of the selections on today’s program had been given similar interpretations.

That said, I had no trouble appreciating the concluding Vivaldi offering, the RV 356 violin concerto in A minor (the sixth in the Opus 3 L’Estro Armonico collection of twelve). (The English title of that collection is best translated as “Furious Harmony!”) The soloist was Augusta McKay Lodge, and she definitely deserves credit for capturing the “furious” rhetoric without ever being overly aggressive. As always, the capture of both audio and video was supervised by David Tayler (whose performances all involved plucked string instruments); but it was interesting to see on the YouTube Web page for this particular selection that he was assisted by Lodge during the final stage of post production.

The two Vivaldi selections were complemented by two single-movement excerpts from compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach. The earlier selection on the program was the final (“Badinerie”) movement from the BWV 1067 (second) orchestra suite in B minor. The solo was taken by Dan Laurin on recorder, and the video included a frolicking porpoise and three stagnant bunnies. The penultimate offering, on the other hand, was the Sinfonia that serves as overture to the BWV 156 cantata Ich steh mit einem Fuß im Grabe (I stand with one foot in the grave). For the most part, the video focused on the solo performance by Marc Schachman on baroque oboe.

Screen shot from the video excerpt from the performance of “Wu Song and the Tiger” with the instrumental ensemble to the right and the solo actor and dancer towards the center

The other contributing composers were Johann Pachelbel, George Frideric Handel (with the familiar Hornpipe movement from his Water Music suites), and Anthony Holborne. There was also a solo lute performance by Tayler of the Scottish tune “It is a wonder to see how the world does go.” Finally, there was a video of the tavern scene from Proosdij’s “Wu Song and the Tiger.” This was an “East meets West” semi-staged performance, which included a pipa played by guest artist Yihan Chen, as well as choreography by Carlos Fittante. I remember seeing this when it was first performed in March of last year, and I was delighted to be reminded of the experience.

Taken as a whole, this new episode emerged as a “more is better” experience, which skillfully made sure that “more” never devolved into “too much!”

Christmas from the 16th to the 21st Century

Last night Herbst Theatre hosted the third program in the current season of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale entitled Six Centuries of Christmas. The original plan was that the span of time would extend to the immediate present with the world premiere performance of a commissioned work by Roderick Williams, but that composition was apparently not completed in time for performance this month. Instead, the six centuries were spanned by two composers with almost exactly the same names: John Taverner (1490–1545) and John Tavener (1944–2013).

This turned out to be an engaging pairing. Each of the two composers had his own way of creating sacred music in a polyphonic setting, but there was a shared rhetoric of intricacy in the play of multiple vocal lines. It is worth noting that, for all of my interest in early music, which has involved several encounters with Taverner, I realized that, thanks to the Church of the Advent of Christ the King, I have been able to enjoy selections of sacred music by both the those composers.

This was only the first of several pairings in the organization of the performance. Two of those pairings were family-related, serving to conclude both the first and second halves of the program. The first of these began with the all-too-familiar canon and gigue coupling by Johann Pachelbel, followed by a Magnificat setting by his son Charles Theodore Pachelbel (who happens to have been one of the first European composers to move to the American colonies, making a career for himself in Charleston, South Carolina). The second pairing began with a sonata for three violins by Giovanni Gabrieli, followed by another Magnificat setting by his uncle Andrea Gabrieli.

The Gabrieli coupling was, in turn, preceded by a Russian coupling. Like the Gabrieli coupling, it was presented in reverse chronological order, beginning with the “Rejoice, O Virgin” movement from Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Opus 37 All-Night Vigil. This was followed by the “Cherubic Hymn” from Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 41 Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom.

The other composers represented on this program were Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck, Antonio Vivaldi (a solo violin concerto composed for the Christmas occasion), Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber, and Johann Heinrich Schmelzer. The program was led from a harpsichord keyboard by Music Director Richard Egarr. Valérie Sainte-Agathe prepared the Chorale. The overall result was a celebratory occasion that was as joyous as it was informative.

Voices of Music Celebrates 100th Sunday Video

After last week’s “hiccup,” the latest installment in the Sunday Mornings at Ten series of YouTube concerts presented by Voices of Music (VoM) was launched this morning at 10 a.m. This was the 27th episode of the series’ third season; but, more significantly, it was the 100th episode since the series was launched. The program consisted of nine archived videos from different performances in the overall VoM series of concerts.

Antonio Vivaldi was featured with three of the violin concertos in The Four Seasons, the first four concertos in his Opus 8 collection entitled Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (the contest between Harmony and Invention). Their “order of appearance” (which was not their order in the Opus 8 publication) was “Winter” (the fourth concerto), “Summer” (the second concerto), and “Spring” (the first concerto). While there was a uniformity of instrumentation for Vivaldi, Johann Sebastian Bach was also represented by three compositions, each with its own unique instrumentation. The first selection was the “Air” movement from the BWV 1068 orchestral suite. This was followed by a complete account of BWV 1048, the third of the “Brandenburg” concertos. The final Bach selection was his BWV 999, consisting of a single prelude movement for lute.

Three other composers were represented by single selections. The first of these was Johann Pachelbel’s canon in D major. Arcangelo Corelli was represented by the fourth concerto (in the key of D major) in his Opus 6 collection. Finally, the program concluded with the only vocal work, “As steals the morn” from George Frideric Handel’s pastoral ode L'Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato, setting the poetry of John Milton.

This was, to say the least, a rich program. In fact, it was roughly twice as long as the usual Sunday Mornings at Ten episodes. Nevertheless, there was never a dull moment; and the video production facilitated keeping track of how the thematic material migrated from one instrument to another.

Performance of BWV 1048 by violinists Carla Moore, Maxine Nemerovski, and Gabrielle Wunsch, violists Katherine Kyme, Maria Caswell, and Lisa Grodin, cellists Tanya Tomkins, Elizabeth Reed, and William Skeen, with continuo by Farley Pearce on violone and Hanneke van Proosdij on double manual harpsichord

Nevertheless, if I had to “play favorites,” I would have to go with BWV 1048. This is a “concerto with a vengeance” with individual solo parts for three violins, three violas, and three cellos. The music itself makes for a rather thick texture; but, because each line is a solo, one can appreciate the interleaving of voices in Bach’s contrapuntal writing.

Here’s looking forward to the next 100 episodes!

Voices of Music Showcases Three Violinists

Since the announcement this past Wednesday of Musica Transalpina, the second Voices of Music (VoM) concert in its 2022–2023 season, there was a minor change in the program’s subtitle. What had been Chamber music from Italy and England had become Seventeenth century music for three violins. Mind you, the violinists, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Cynthia Freivogel, and Augusta McKay Lodge, all of whom can be counted as “VoM veterans,” were cited in Wednesday’s article; but last night they were also acknowledged by the new subtitle. In addition, the number of composers included on the program had significantly expanded.

For most of us in the audience, the program was a generous journey of discovery, even where familiar names such as John Dowland (not mentioned in Wednesday’s article) were concerned. Indeed, in the context of my own listening experiences, familiarity only began to emerge towards the end of the evening with selections from Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber’s “Rosary” sonatas and the all-too familiar canon and gigue movements by Johann Pachelbel. Mind you, it is worth noting that, with only three violinists, the attentive listener was in a better position to appreciate the “echo” effects that made the canon sound like a canon. For that matter, in addition to contributing to a trio, each violinist had solo opportunities along with the different combinations of duo pairings.

Taken as a whole, most of the program selections may have been unfamiliar; but the skilled virtuoso turns delivered by all three of the violinists made the entire evening a thoroughly engaging offering.

Seasonal German Baroque Music from ABS

Participants (clockwise from the upper-left corner) Mark Bonney, Nola Richardson, Jeffrey Thomas, Curtis Streetman, Jay Carter, and Elijah McCormack (from the ABS Calendar Web page)

At the end of this month, American Bach Soloists (ABS) will present a program appropriate for the Lent season. Four soulful and moving compositions will be presented, each by a different prominent German composer from the Baroque period. Five vocal soloists will contribute to the performance: soprano Nola Richardson, male soprano Elijah McCormack, countertenor Jay Carter, tenor Mark Bonney, and bass Curtis Streetman. As always, Artistic Director Jeffrey Thomas will conduct.

The program will begin with the least familiar of the four contributing composers, a the ten-movement composition by Johann Theile entitled PASSIO, Domini nostri Jesu Christi (the Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ). This will be followed by Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 196 cantata Der Herr denket an uns (the Lord is mindful of us). Those are the first words of Psalm 115; and the cantata was probably composed to celebrate the wedding of the minister who had married Bach and his wife, Maria Barbara. However, the words of that Psalm are appropriate for meditation during Lent. A far darker meditation is inspired by Christ lag in Todesbanden (Christ lay in the bonds of death), a seven-movement cantata by Johann Pachelbel composed for a ten-part ensemble. The program will then conclude with Dieterich Buxtehude’s setting of the Eastertide chorale “Jesu, meine Freude” (Jesus, my joy).

The San Francisco performance of this program will begin at 4 p.m. on Sunday, March 27. It will take place in St. Mark’s Lutheran Church, located at 1111 O’Farrell Street, just west of Franklin Street. The eastbound Geary Bus (number 38) stops within a block of the church after it leaves Geary Boulevard to proceed along O’Farrell. There are also nearby stops for buses on Van Ness Avenue.

Ticket prices are $101, $77, $56, and $39, with seating for the disabled priced at both $101 and $39. All tickets may be purchased through an ABS Web page. That Web page includes an interactive display for checking where seats are available in each of the four sections. The checkout process will include a display of safety policies, and an agreement must be affirmed before the transaction is completed.

ABS Launches Summer Festival with Soloists

Late yesterday afternoon the American Bach Soloists (ABS) launched its annual Summer Festival with a program in which each of the performers took his/her own turns at being a soloist. Much of the program was devoted to concertos for three violins, allowing Artistic Director and Conductor Jeffrey Thomas to give the program the coy title Triples Alley with a clear nod to Oracle Park. The violinists serving as concerto soloists consisted of (in alphabetical order) Jacob Ashworth, Cynthia Keiko Black, Elizabeth Blumenstock, Tatiana Chulochnikova, Tomà Illiev, YuEun Gemma Kim, and David Wilson. However, all the other ensemble parts were also taken by single performers: Ramón Negrón Pérez on viola, William Skeen on cello, and Corey Jamason on harpsichord.

First page of the oldest surviving copy of Pachelbel’s canon and gigue, whose canon theme is written out only once (from the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

For the most part the composers constituted the “usual suspects” in ABS programming: Antonio Vivaldi, Georg Philipp Telemann, George Frideric Handel, and (of course) Johann Sebastian Bach. However, there were also single-movement sonatas for three violins by Giovanni Battista Buonamente and Marco Uccellini. These two sonatas were performed as a set by Black, Blumenstock, and Kim, who then concluded the set with the more familiar canon by Johann Pachelbel coupled with its less familiar gigue. That canon is no longer played to death as it was during the Seventies, after Jean-François Paillard unleashed his chamber orchestra version on the world; but it really takes one-to-a-part playing to appreciate the interleavings that unfold as each phrase passes from one solo violin to another.

True to the program title, almost all of the selections featured three solo violinists. The one exception came with the second Vivaldi selection on the program, the B minor concerto for four violins, which is the tenth concerto in his Opus 3 collection entitled L’estro Armonico (the harmonic inspiration). Bach seems to have been quite a fan of Vivaldi’s music; and he liked this particular composition so much that he repurposed it as a concerto for four harpsichords in A minor (BWV 1065). (Back when I was teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, I had the good fortune to attend a performance of both of these concertos played consecutively, organized by one of the professors in the Music Department.)

Overall, the concert was a stimulating demonstration of how concertos for multiple instruments still allow each of the participating soloists to display his/her own approaches to virtuosity. That virtuosity would also occasionally percolate down to the continuo, allowing Skeen to take the spotlight every now and then. Needless to say, the audience reception was enthusiastic; and it was clear that everyone there was delighted to be in Herbst to experience the return of ABS concert performances.

PBO Strings Survey Music of Georg Muffat

Last night the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale (PBO) YouTube channel released the Grand Finale video for the 2020/2021 season. The program was organized around the last three of the five string sonatas that Georg Muffat collected under the title Armonico Tributo (harmonic tribute). The fourth and fifth sonatas were separated by the most familiar offering on the program, Johann Pachelbel’s coupling of canon and gigue movements in D major.

Earlier in the day, YouTube had released a pre-concert talk by Richard Egarr, for the benefit of those of us (present company included) unfamiliar with Muffat. Ever one to find the perfect groaner, Egarr titled his talk “Little Missed Muffat…and a Loose Canon,” managing to hit both composers with the same stone. However, most of the talk was devoted to Muffat.

Most memorable was Egarr’s noting of Muffat’s approach to scoring, composing two separate parts for the violas as well as two such parts for the violin. This made for some of the richest string instrumentation one is likely to find in the seventeenth century, particularly when the score also includes lines for solo instruments. While only the third, fourth, and fifth sonatas were performed, Egarr also summarized the keys of the complete set of five: D major, G minor, A major, E minor, and G major. He suggested that the final sonata established a “tonic,” while the opening sonata served as the “dominant,” meaning that the collection, taken as a whole, amounted to an embellished dominant-tonic progression.

For the most part these sonatas were collections of short movements, more in the spirit of a seventeenth-century suite than what we would now call a sonata. However, the final movement of the fifth sonata is a passacaglia; and, like the passacaglias composed by Johann Sebastian Bach and François Couperin, it involves variations on a theme unfolding in a much more prodigious duration. (Apparently, writing variations on a passacaglia theme is a bit like eating potato chips.) All of Muffat’s variations allowed impressive material for the entire ensemble, reinforced by the attentive camera work at the Bing Concert Hall on the campus of Stanford University.

There is a tendency to associate the Pachelbel music with an equally lush ensemble of strings. PBO, on the other hand, provided solo instruments for each of the three voices of the canon, with continuo restricted to harpsichord and theorbo. This provided sufficient transparency for the listener to appreciate that the music really was a canon, weaving its sinuous line across the three solo instruments.

The entire program lasted about three-quarters of an hour; and, while the duration of the concluding passacaglia may not have been expected, it added a bit of suspense to the overall program.

PBO Announces Final Virtual Concert of Season

This coming Tuesday the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra (PBO) will present its final virtual concert for the 2020/2021 season. The program will present three of the five string sonatas composed by Georg Muffat and collected under the title Armonico Tributo (harmonic tribute). These will be the third in the key of A major, the fourth in the key of E minor, and the fifth in the key of G major. The fourth and fifth sonatas will be separated by the most familiar offering on the program, Johann Pachelbel’s coupling of canon and gigue movements in D major.

The filming session for next week’s PBO virtual concert (from the event page for this performance)

These will be performed by the largest gathering of PBO musicians since the onset of COVID-19. Sixteen string musicians gathered for filming this past March 29 and 30, performing on the stage of the Bing Concert Hall on the campus of Stanford University. The ensemble was led by violinist Elizabeth Blumenstock, PBO co-concertmaster.

The film will be streamed through YouTube at 8 p.m. on Tuesday, May 25. There will be no charge for viewing. The YouTube hyperlink will be installed on the Web page for this program, most likely at an earlier time on the date of the performance.

cpo Concludes Recording Pachelbel Organ Music

courtesy of Naxos of America

At the beginning of this past November, the German cpo label released the third volume in its project to record the complete organ music of Johann Pachelbel. The first release of the project took place in the summer of 2013 in the form of a five-CD box set of performances by four organists: Christian Schmitt, James David Christie, Jürgen Essl, and Michael Belotti. In October of 2016, this site reported the release of the second volume, with two CDs of performances by three of the four organists that performed for the first volume. (Schmitt was absent from this volume.) At that time it was announced that the entire project was expected to fill ten CDs. Sure enough the third volume consists of three CDs, each presenting performances by a different organist, Belotti, Schmitt, and Christie, respectively. All recordings in the collection were made from performances on historic organs in central and southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

The report on the second volume observed that each CD was organized around an overall “topic,” based, for the most part, on the liturgical calendar. The same can be said of the third volume but with the caveat that, in all of the volumes, the categories are relatively loosely defined. Nevertheless, most of the music is associated with some kind of sacred context, primarily chorale preludes and fugues based on earlier settings of liturgical texts. Nevertheless, the third volume offers a few “secular” toccatas and fugues, along with one arietta and one chaconne (which is not the infamous “Pachelbel’s canon,” which was written for string instruments, rather than organ).

The author of Pachelbel’s Wikipedia page observes that Pachelbel’s compositions are “less virtuosic and less adventurous harmonically than that of Dieterich Buxtehude,” who was Pachelbel’s senior by about fifteen years. However, only six CDs are necessarily to account for all of Buxtehude’s organ compositions. Johann Sebastian Bach, on the other hand was over thirty years younger than Pachelbel. Bach’s eldest brother Johann Christoph had studied under Pachelbel. Sebastian, on the other hand, first became interested in Buxtehude when he was in his teens and would later upset his employer (the New Church in Arnstadt) by taking an extended leave to walk 280 miles to Lübeck to listen to Buxtehude play his original compositions. Buxtehude was probably a far greater inspiration than Pachelbel; and the Bach 2000 anthology allocates sixteen CDs to Bach’s organ works!

Nevertheless, it would be unfair to try to “rank order” Buxtehude or Pachelbel alongside Bach. Those with a serious interest in the organ music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries should definitely take advantage of the availability of “complete works” collections of those respective composers’ compositions for organ. It is therefore more than a little satisfying to report that cpo has now completed their project to honor Pachelbel’s achievements.

A Delayed Move into the Baroque Period

Yesterday afternoon at the Church of the Advent of Christ the King, the San Francisco Early Music Society presented the San Francisco performance of a program prepared by Agave Baroque entitled Peace in our Time: Music of Love and Loss in the Shadow of the Thirty Years’ War. The program could also have been called The Baroque Comes to Germany. Claude V. Palisca’s “Baroque” entry for Grove Music Online sets the “rough boundaries” of the Baroque period as 1600 and 1750. However, between 1618 and 1648 most of Central Europe had to endure the Thirty Years’ War, which not only impeded any advancement in musical practices but also probably destroyed much of what any of those practices had achieved.

Agave’s program thus emerged as an engaging survey of the second half of the seventeenth century in Germany with, as leader and violinist Aaron Westman put it, only one familiar piece on the program. Perhaps by way of compensation, that piece was familiar with a vengeance, the canon and gigue in D major composed by Johann Pachelbel. While this music may no longer be played to death as vigorously as it had been during the last quarter of the twentieth century, it probably still elicits groans from those who have heard it too many times. (My own groans were probably cultivated by the fundraisers for Public Broadcasting.)

Nevertheless, it is worth noting that most of the “popular” treatments of this music give little account to the fact that this piece is a canon played over a ground bass. As might be expected, when the music is played by a large string ensemble whose practices are more at home in the nineteenth century, little, if any, regard for the intricate counterpoint rarely cuts through all the schmaltz. As a result, the real merits of this music only emerge when each of the voices is played by a solo instrument.

First page of the oldest surviving copy of Pachelbel’s canon (from Wikimedia Commons, public domain)

This was the treatment given yesterday by Agave violinist Westman, Natalie Carducci, and Anna Washburn. The attentive listener could easily grasp how each phrase constructed above the ground bass would migrate from one instrument to another, allowing superposition to build up a thoroughly engaging and constantly changing contrapuntal fabric. Furthermore, canon performance is no mere mathematical exercise. Each two-bar “seed” may be repeated across three players, but each player still has his/her own discretion to guide the phrasing of that seed. Thus, when listening to a performance, one appreciates the individuality of each performer as well as the harmonies that emerge when those individualities are combined. One might almost say that this approach to canon is the honored and venerable ancestor of the jazz practice of trading fours.

As Westman observed, the remainder of the program involved encounters with the unfamiliar. Those included a branch of the Bach family tree that receives far less attention than Johann Sebastian and his sons. This is the branch headed by Sebastian’s great uncle Heinrich (1615–1692) and his son Johann Christoph (1642–1703). The program also included students of Heinrich Schütz, such as Matthias Weckmann and David Pohle. (Schütz took refuge in Venice during the Thirty Years’ War, studying and working with Claudio Monteverdi.)

From a musical point of view, one of the most intriguing signs of transition was a bold emergence of chromaticism. This included bold passages of descending semitones (what one of my teachers liked to call “slimy chromaticism”). It is important to recognize that these passages were written by composers who had not yet encountered the possibilities of equal temperament. As a result, their execution in counterpoint by string players demands very acute listening to make sure that every simultaneous interval is accorded its own proper sonority. It did not take long to appreciate that all of the Agave players are listeners of the highest order, allowing those chromatic passages to emerge boldly without ever sounding like “wrong notes.”

Roughly half of the program involved vocal selections sung by countertenor Reginald Mobley. Mobley has partnered with Agave for some time; and, when it comes to performance-as-listening, his voice consistently fits into the fabrics woven by Agave’s contrapuntal playing. Possibly in acknowledgement of the peace that finally concluded the Thirty Years’ War, Mobley sang texts in both German and Latin. However, there was an intense sense of personal feeling in his Latin accounts that was a far cry from Renaissance austerity. This was particularly evident in Johann Rosenmüller’s setting of “Christum ducem, qui per crucem,” whose trochaic tetrameter follows the sternly oppressive rhythms of the “Dies irae” and “Stabat mater” texts. Rosenmüller totally rejected the rhythm of the text, focusing only on the expressivity of the words; and Mobley knew exactly how to deliver that expressivity.

The cpo Project to Record Pachelbel’s Organ Music Advances to its Second Volume

Exactly a week ago the German label cpo released the second volume in its project to record the complete organ music of Johann Pachelbel. Three of the four organists that had contributed to the first volume, which was released in the summer of 2013, are performing. These are (in alphabetical order of their last names) Michael Belotti, James David Christie, and Jürgen Essl. According to the booklet notes provided by Belotti (translated into English by J. Bradford Robinson), the entire project is expected to fill ten CDs. The first volume accounted for five of those CDs, while the new release advances the count by only two. The recordings for this volume were made from performances on historic organs in central and southern Germany, Switzerland, and Austria.

Belotti is also the editor of a new edition of The Complete Works for Keyboard, which is used as the source for all performances. This publication is also a work-in-progress. It is planned as a series of twelve volumes, only the first five of which have been published to date. The volumes are organized by genre, and the third through fifth of them are devoted entirely to fugues based on the theme of the Magnificat chant. Within this category the fugues are usually (but not always) arranged in groups of four and classified according to the eight reciting tones, which are related to the modal scales for plainchant. Across the seven CDs released thus far, there are representatives of all eight tones; but it is clear that the recording of the entire contents of these volumes of these fugues is not yet complete.

Each of the two CDs in the second volume also has an overall “topic.” The first volume involves liturgical music for Christmas. This consists primarily of chorale preludes for hymns covering services from Advent to Epiphany, along with eight of the Magnificat fugues, performed as two sets of four. The remainder of the CD includes preludes, toccatas, and fugues that would have been played during different portions of the service. The second volume is devoted to a collection of Psalm Hymns. The booklet identifies it as the third such collection with little information about how many others there are. Five Psalms (103, 124, 127, 130, and 137) are included, each represented by multiple compositions, usually including at least one chorale prelude and one fugue. There is also an “introductory” prelude and fugue not associated with any specific Psalm.

All of this music was the result of Pachelbel’s profession as a church organist. Like Dietrich Buxtehude, he comes from the generation preceding that of Johann Sebastian Bach. Bach may not have made the same sort of pilgrimage for Pachelbel that he made to listen to Buxtehude; but his oldest brother, Johann Christian, had studied under Pachelbel. This recording project thus provides a valuable source of background knowledge for those interested in both playing and listening to Sebastian’s music.

At this point I must observe, in all fairness, that all of the tracks I have listened to since the project was first launched were “first contact” experiences. Any familiarity comes entirely from the the source material for both the hymns and the Magnificat chant. As a result I am not particularly equipped for any “deep-end examination.” On the other hand I have a strong personal interest in the organ repertoire, particularly for music prior to the nineteenth century; so it did not take much to lure me into following the current cpo project. However, the best I can report in fairness is that the combinations of instrument and performer (probably along with recording team) all yield a clarity of the music that Pachelbel wrote that is far more than merely satisfying. In other words the attentive listener will come away from these recordings with a generous perspective of the context in which Bach would pursue his own craft as an organist. What more could one wish for in venturing into this particular unknown territory?