A Pivotal Figure

The excellent performing trio of John Holloway violin, Jaap ter Linden viola da gamba and Lars Ulrik Mortensen harpsichord are the featured artists on this disk of the chamber music of Buxtehude. The works in question on this disk are the Seven Trio Sonatas Op 2. Having been born half a century after Heinrich Schutz, "the father of German musicians", and a little less than half a century before J S Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude was a living link between the founder of Protestant Baroque music and its foremost practitioner. Bach famously walked for several days to hear Buxtehude perform. The Seven Sonatas Op 2 possess a very personal stamp of unpredictability, virtuosity and expressive power. Of particular note are Buxtehude's use of stylised dances in the first sonata and his quasi-improvisatory passages in the "fantastic" style in the fifth sonata. Holloway is a superb interpretor of this repertoire and his colleagues always offer the most appropriate support. This release is now on Naxos, it was originally recorded by Dacapo and lacks just a little of the sound quality of this trio's ECM releases.