Buxtehude

Dieterich Buxtehude's organ works are his most significant contribution to the history of music. They consist of a comprehensive corpus of just 90 compositions, of which more than half are chorale settings. However, these are mostly shorter than the preludes, toccatas and other freely conceived pieces, so these last represent a more substantial share of his entire output.

With this disc the Purcell Quartet completes a traversal of the trio sonatas (or “suonate,” to use the title on this disc) of Dietrich Buxtehude for violin, viola da gamba, and harpsichord. For unknown reasons, the op. 2 set has received far fewer recordings than has the op. 1, this being only the third in the active catalog. (As for how a quartet plays trios, the answer is that the two violinists take turns; Read more sonata da camera and sonata da chiesa of the high Baroque. Instead, within a compass of about 10 minutes, there are anywhere from five to 14 distinct sections within one sonata,

Carlos Chávez was one of the most influential champions of modern Mexican concert music. He was passionate about his Mexican musical heritage, and recognized this richness. In 1928, he helped to organize the Orquesta Sinfónica de México and was its principal conductor until 1949, when the orchestra became the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional, as it is now known.

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.

The much-recorded set of seven Pietistic cantatas Fanfare 12:5) and the other (Weckmann’s) by Max van Egmond (16:4). In addition to the 17 versions of the main work listed earlier (31:5), Jörg Breiding has recently led a new version which, like this one, has generous fillers. The present version uses one voice to a part along with the Purcell Quartet (violins and organ) and Fretwork (a viol consort), almost exactly the makeup of the favored version under Harry Christophers (34:1). The new version is five minutes longer than that one, not counting the fillers, but neither one approaches the extremes of fast and slow that were noted in the earlier survey.