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.