The elegant and courtly world of Bach’s chamber music, explored through his longstanding affection for the intimate sound of the viola da gamba.
Bach owned a viola da gamba and may very well have played it himself, along with the violin and the keyboard family. While the instrument was already becoming obsolete during his lifetime, to be replaced by the stronger and more reliable sound of the cello, Bach evidently enjoyed writing for it, and perhaps for the virtuoso instrumentalists with whom he came into contact, firstly as Capellmeister at the court in Cothen, and then as Cantor of St Thomas’s Church in Leipzig.
The measured eloquence of the gamba is heard at its most affecting in the St John and St Matthew Passions, where Bach used it as an obbligato instrument at points of most inward contemplation. His writing for it as a chamber-music instrument, in the three sonatas BWV1027-1029 which have come down to us, is less florid, though at points no less challenging. The quick movements engage in lively discourse with the continuo, while the slow sections draw out the gamba’s potential to sustain a long singing line.
What makes this new recording unique is the transcriptions of other chamber-music pieces: the Sonatas BWV527, 1019, 1023 and 1030. BWV527 is more familiar as a trio sonata (for organ or chamber group); BWV1019 and 1023 are drawn from the collection of six sonatas composed for violin and harpsichord; 1030 is more familiar as a flute sonata. However, the melody line of all four works fits sympathetically onto the wide register of the gamba.
Through these new recordings, Rainer Zipperling and Pieter-Jan Belder draw us into Bach’s domestic circle with their unforced and gently persuasive accounts. Zipperling has played with many of Europe’s most renowned early-music groups such as the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century, La Petite Bande, Ricercar Consort and Camerata Köln. He has regularly performed with Sir John Eliot Gardiner and the English Baroque Soloists as principal cellist and gambist. He also worked with Claudio Abbado and his Orchestra Mozart, performing the Brandenburg Concertos. He is joined here by Pieter-Jan Belder, who has made so many first-class recordings of Baroque repertoire for Brilliant Classics, as both instrumentalist and conductor.
