Omnia Fermenta

On this of Alessandro Scarlatti's opera omnia for keyboard, once again the star is the eighteenth century Italian Anonymous Ferrarese harpsichord owned by Francesco Tasini. Extremely interesting is the interpretation by Francesco Tasini - a master of the period performance practice - that succeeds in giving us a perfect understanding of the correct approach to the compositions by Alessandro Scarlatti, true founder of the Neapolitan keyboard School.

In the last decade of the 17th century, Dieterich Buxtehude published within a period of two years a group of fourteen instrumental chamber sonatas in two sets of seven each. Thereby, he contributed in a major way to a new and fashionable repertoire of trio sonatas that had originated in Italy after the middle of the century. Giovanni Legrenzi (1626-1690), the Venetian composer, had played the main influence in spreading a new type of instrumental music north of the Alps. His works published in the 1660s and 70s were well known in the Hanseatic cities around the Baltic Sea.

The Buxtehude Opera Omnia series is steadily progressing. It is with great pleasure that I present to you the final part of Dieterich Buxtehude’s organ works. Now that the task of recording all the organ and harpsichord works has been completed, the astounding quality of this music has become evident. Naturally, organists play Buxtehude’s works with relative frequency. However, only a dozen or so of his works are actually performed regularly.

In my introduction to the first two CDs of Buxtehude’s organ works, I explained my division of Buxtehude’s œuvre in two parts: works for organ in mean-tone tuning and works for organ in Werck- meister tuning. I have also adopted this division here.

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.

Buxtehude the organist expanded his activities as a vocal composer in an unprecedented way. He left a particular mark as a composer of large-scale oratorios («Abendmusiken»). His oratorios have not survived, but the many other vocal compositions that have come down to us represent a substantial body of works. These include in particular larger and shorter chorale settings of various kinds, sacred concertos (i.e., motets with differentiated instrumental accompaniment), arias, and multi-movement structures consisting of concertos, arias, and chorales that were later referred to as cantatas. This album (as did vol.V) presents a mixed selection of works in the above mentioned genres: arias, concertos, and – as a composite of the two – cantatas.

Having completed his years-long traversal through the vocal music of Johann Sebastian Bach for Challenge Classics, Ton Koopman picks up the thread with a valuable new series surveying the complete works of Bach's Danish predecessor Dietrich Buxtehude. While Buxtehude's total output for organ has already been surveyed, albeit infrequently, on record, there are still many works falling outside that genre that have never been committed to vinyl or disc, so this is potentially a highly valuable project.