Silvius Leopold Weiss

This is now the third disc I have heard by the master lutenist Jakob Lindberg of the eloquent music of Sylvius Weiss. Weiss sweetly combines elegance and sentiment in a manner that is both intellectually and sensually satisfying. To my ears, Lindberg portrays the music perfectly, the sensitive Sarabande in the Sonata in C as well as the ensuing minuet, the tension of the opening of the Tombeau sur la Mort de M. Comte de Logy as well as the devastatingly sober theme. The Tombeau is an almost 12-minute piece at a tempo that crawls rather than walks, and yet it holds the attention.

Product Details
Performer: Sylvius Leopold Weiss, Robert Barto
Composer: Silvius Leopold Weiss, Sylvius Leopold Weiss
Review
This is a terrific introduction to a mostly forgotten or ignored composer. Some of the intervals and progressions seem to be precursors for very modern jazz. Maybe that's my take on it but Leopold Sylvius Weiss is worth exploring, and Robert Barto seems to have spent a lot of time learning and understanding these rigorous and exhilirating compostions.

Duo Ahlert & Schwab have dedicated themselves, through their choice of instruments, to one of the smallest repertoires to be found in the classical music pantheon, that for guitar and mandolin. On this Naxos' effort, Daniel Ahlert plays the mandolin, and Birgit Schwab takes Baroque guitar and archlute parts in works of Sylvius Leopold Weiss and Giovanni Hoffmann. Being German, they identify Giovanni Hoffmann under the wholly inauthentic name of "Johann Hoffmann," which can lead to some confusion.

This recording features a work with a strange coincidence in its compositional process and an astonishing dual authorship. Remarkably, Silvius Leopold Weiss’s Lute Suite SW47 (which he named Suonata) also comes with a violin part that can be played over the top of it, composed by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach. A recent comparison of sources revealed that the harpsichord part in Bach’s Suite for Violin & Harpsichord BWV1025, long considered to be of doubtful attribution, perfectly matches Weiss’s suite. The violin part, meanwhile, was indeed composed entirely by Bach and is an additional melody independent of Weiss’s musical material. It feels almost like a ‘free improvisation’ above the suite and recalls a similar process carried out by Charles Gounod in 1859: his Ave Maria fits over the first Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier BWV846. The sole exception is the Fantasia movement in Bach’s piece, which is not derived from Weiss’s suite, meaning both the violin and harpsichord parts in it are unique to Bach.