Son of the better-known Georg Muffat, Gottlieb was also hawked around the courts of Europe by his father as a boy wonder of music, anticipating the course of Mozart’s early years under the self-interested care of Leopold. However, when at home, Gottlieb Muffat grew up in Vienna under the careful tutelage of Johann Joseph Fux, master of music at the Hofkapelle, a relationship which deepened once Georg died in 1704, when Gottlieb was just 14 years old.
In due course Fux pulled strings to get his talented pupil an official post, and this album of keyboard partitas offers ample proof that his faith in Gottlieb Muffat was justified. Their date is uncertain: during his lifetime, only two collections of his music were published, and after 1739 he seems to have broken off composition, focusing his energies on performing and teaching at the Hofkapelle.
Listeners familiar with the keyboard partitas by JS Bach will find a certain degree of common ground in the elegant sequence of French-style dances which are headed by a more exploratory Prelude. Muffat’s counterpoint may not be so rigorous, but his ear for a well-turned melody offers satisfying reward in its own right. The use of French, English and even Spanish titles to individual movements underlines the imaginative and fanciful qualities of the collection: see for example Postillon in the Suite in F major; Coquette in the Suite in A major; a Hornpipe in the Suite in D minor and the Intrada to the Suite in F.
As well as enthusiastically received albums of Pasquini, Gabrieli, Vivaldi and above all Frescobaldi, Roberto Loreggian has previously recorded the 1739 collection of Componimenti Musicali to which this new recording forms a sequel. Of his collection of Partitas by Telemann, Fanfare commented: ‘Without seeming driven, his playing is lively and well-articulated, and he is always sensitive to Telemann’s stylistic variety, whether it is tending, at any given moment, to the courtly or to the common.’
