Bach's Trio Sonatas
Bach's Trio Sonatas
The Gramophone Choice
Trio Sonatas, BWV525-30
Brook Street Band (Rachel Harris, Farran Scott vns Tatty Theo vc Carolyn Gibley hpd)
Avie AV2199 (69’ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
As Brook Street Band founder and cellist Tatty Theo says in her booklet-notes, the band’s reason for recording yet another arrangement of Bach’s six trio sonatas for organ has been for ‘the sheer pleasure of playing this wonderful music, and the wish to share it’. And it shows, with unaffected performances of remarkable freshness and vitality. Bach took the Italian trio sonata and ‘organ-ised’ it, assigning the two melodic lines to one manual apiece and the bass to the pedal. Theo’s arrangements ‘reassign’ the melodic lines to the violins and the bass to cello and harpsichord continuo; harpsichordist Carolyn Gibley is careful, too, not to obscure Bach’s writing with her right hand.
The BSB’s approach combines the clarity of London Baroque with the elegance of the Purcell Quartet while hinting at the colour of the Palladian Ensemble, which employs recorders and plucked strings as well as violin and gamba. But the exuberance is all BSB’s own. Theo’s bass is clear and firm throughout, providing a centre of gravity for violinists Rachel Harris and Farran Scott to really dance. The variety of string articulation together with Gibley’s discreet harmonisations further serve both to enliven and to elucidate Bach’s musical arguments. Superb.
Additional Recommendation
Trio Sonatas, BWV525-30
Purcell Quartet (Catherine Weiss, Catherine Mackintosh vns Robert Woolley hpd Richard Boothby va da gamba)
Chandos Chaconne CHAN0654 (73’ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
‘Too good to be left only to organists’ is how Richard Boothby cheekily describes Bach’s six delightful ‘organ trios’, in which the organist’s two hands play one of the upper lines each, while the bass is played on the pedals. Such is the integrity of this texture in Bach’s writing that transferral of this music to a ‘true’ trio sonata line-up of two melody instruments and continuo is a relatively simple and satisfactory task, and there seems to have been no shortage in recent years of musicians who would agree with Boothby to the point of making their own arrangements for various small ensembles. On disc, these have often served as filler items. Recordings of all six are rarer.
Boothby’s arrangements for the Purcell Quartet differ from the others currently available in involving no wind instruments. He shows considerable imagination, however, in convincingly varying the scoring between just two violins, viola da gamba and harpsichord, transferring the melodic line to his own viola da gamba whenever the tessitura demands in some movements, making it a full-blown partner in the dialogue in others, and also awarding the harpsichord a melodic role in BWV530.
Typically for the Purcell Quartet, the performances offer a sweet sound and a clarity of texture which is all to the good in such intricately and ingeniously contrapuntal music. Generally speaking, however, these performances are enjoyable for their lightness and tenderness (try the slow movement of BWV529).
