Bob Szajner Digital Ensemble Audio_056 Trio

It is difficult to understand why the twelve sonatas by Johann Philipp Krieger recorded here are almost completely forgotten today. Those who listen more closely to them will discover a rich cosmos of melodic, harmonic, and stylistic ideas that could hardly be rendered more vividly in musical tones. These Baroque sonatas seemingly randomly join together the most sparkling strands of pearls – short and very short little movements, spontaneous ideas, witty episodes, and oscillating emotional states in what are rapid and above all fascinating sequences. They are to be understood as little scenes of a musical drama 'en miniature'. Krieger’s sonatas structured in small units recall characters on the stage in their careful design and perfect compositional-technical elaboration. They engage in cooperative action, oppose each other, and react to each other, enter into musical dialogue or competition, fall in love with each other and rise up in mutual embrace, and laugh or cry together – just as in real life.

On this 2007 Helios reissue, the Raphael Ensemble delivers a powerfully emotional reading of Franz Schubert's String Quintet in C major, D. 956, one that presents it as a fully fledged Romantic work with little Classical restraint. If this piece is regarded as a testament of the composer's anguished inner life, as it was written in 1828 and completed just weeks before Schubert died, then the stormy interpretation given here is perhaps appropriate and valid, insofar as it expresses sudden mood swings, restlessness, intense sorrow, and inconsolable rage.