We regard baroque music as architecture with ornamentation at our peril. The opening sonata here of Gott hilf mir shifts and shimmers like the waters of the flood about to be described every bit as much as Mendelssohn's Hebrides is full of tides and undercurrents.
The sopranos and countertenors don't have all the best music, either, as Sebastian Myrus despairs as the flood rises, his bass forlorn and with restraint, until God, of course, comes to our rescue and we are grateful that he saved us. It might have been easier not to send the flood in the first place but whatever God does, it's always for the best in works like these.
This disc offers a programme of what might have been on one of Buxtehude's series of evening concerts in Lubeck, an alternating mix of cantatas and trio sonatas. Although in his lifetime, and for a long time subsequently, he was known almost exclusively for his organ playing and compositions, they only account for four out of twenty-nine discs in the Opera Omnia and choral work clearly took up more of his time.
If the long notes of Herzlich lieb hab ich dich remind me of the Sancta Maria from Monteverdi's Vespers, I'll leave it to someone better qualified to say rather than claim further musicological discoveris but it would come as no surprise if Buxtehude knew a thing or two about Monteverdi and the exquisite small forces of Ensemble Masque weave their parts in and out of the vocal line.
Sophie Gent, who played a different sonata at Wigmore Hall earlier this year, stars in the joyous B flat major. At first I thought, no, the sound is more pointed in the violin here, not what I'm used to at all but very soon, accompanied by the gamba, we are off on a thrilling little jaunt. In conversation and playing off each other, there are jazzy touches that extend the versions by John Holloway and Ton Koopman's violinist, Catherine Manson, to make one wonder what Stephane Grappelli might have been like playing Buxtehude.
For all that Buxtehude's default setting seems to be spare and desolate, ideal for enjoying melancholy, there's much more to it than that.
The final trio sonata gives the gamba more opportunities before the chaconne of Jesu, meines lebens leben leaves us with a tune that will remain with us for however much of the day remains.
I had pencilled in the Belcea Quartet's Shostakovich as Best Disc of the Year, prematurely. This is going to take some thinking about and we are just into August.
