I am delighted to share this programme in collaboration with the Dunedin Consort. This programme is of particular interest to me in how it traces the development of instrumental chamber writing from the first part of the 18th century to the transition to the early Galant style.   

 While 17th century chamber repertoire retains some ambiguity as to which instruments it is specifically written for, composers from the beginning of the 18th century start to embrace more strongly the timbres and capacities of particular instruments. As we move through time, the pieces become increasingly explicit in their instrumentation, culminating with the works by Telemann and Rameau.   

In the earliest piece on this programme, the 1695 Sonata in B-flat Major by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, the instrumentation is intended for two violins with basso continuo in trio sonata form; today we perform it on a traverso and a violin – a very common historical adaptation. The piece features the looser movements and fluid transitions between sections that are a trademark of  earlier 17th century sonatas. Beginning in the 1660s, Louis XIV and Jean-Baptiste Lully had crafted a Franco-Italian musical hegemony; the next generation of composers, including Jacquet and François Couperin, developed a style born out of Lully’s Franco-Italian musical language that also took inspiration from newer Italian sonatas, which is often referred to as the goûts réunis. Jacquet’s writing shows her integrating the new Italian style into French idioms. Through the incredibly powerful cultural exportation of the Ancien Régime, this style became widely used across Europe throughout the first half of the 18th century.

With the first volume of the Paris Quartets (1730), Georg Philipp Telemann explicitly breaks the mould of the trio sonata by adding an extra solo part for the viol – an instrument strongly associated with French musical tradition – and by experimenting with the quartet form. Interestingly, Telemann retains the relatively quick transitions between movements that we hear in Jacquet’s trio sonata; by 1730, audiences would have understood this as a nod to French chamber music works imitating the Italian style which often contained long overtures with multiple short-form movements, as in Couperin’s Les Nations (1726).

In the 1741 Pièces de clavecin en concerts by Rameau, the harpsichord finally steps into a full solo role with an obbligato part (an independently and through-composed part, as opposed to a basso continuo part), setting the precedent for the emergence of the piano trio. Rameau mixes old and new by creating a new genre with the harpsichord trio and by choosing to feature the antiquated viol as the solo bass instrument. These pieces meld Italian style and French ornamentation in a decadent final flourishing of the goûts réunis style through a series of character pieces and portraits dedicated to leading musicians and amateurs of mid eighteenth-century Paris.

Bach, as always, is a world unto himself, combining styles from across Europe with his characteristic contrapuntal rigour, which gradually fell out of fashion during his lifetime. The two sonatas we will play today tell vastly different stories. The Trio Sonata in C Major, which we are performing as an instrumental trio, is one of his organ trio sonatas (manuscript, late 1720s) for two hands and a pedal part. The piece takes inspiration from the Italian style and, like the rest of the collection, only contains three movements. The practice of transcribing pieces for different purposes was one that Bach frequently used, displaying his capacity, on the one hand, to write idiomatically for specific instruments, and on the other, to create works that could be easily played by any combination of timbres.   

The last sonata constitutes the centrepiece of The Musical Offering, a collection of pieces using one particularly challenging chromatic theme that was set by Frederick the Great of Prussia, a passionate amateur flautist, during Bach’s visit to his son Carl Phillip Emanuel in 1747. The Musical Offering includes two solo ricercare for the harpsichord, ten canons and one trio sonata. The sonata itself is in four movements, and while in Italian style, the piece is most notable for the complex imitation and virtuosic counterpoint that only Bach could have imagined writing in the late 1740s. The piece modulates extensively and combines mid 18th-century instrumental virtuosity with the polyphonic compositional techniques of much older masters.

In exploring the historical arc of the trio sonata in Europe over the first half of the 18th century and its evolution away from that form, this programme showcases the introduction of novel timbres and colours in instrumental music of the High Baroque.

As I always do, I encourage you to enjoy this music in the present and let these considerations fall away into a beautiful moment shared together. Thank you for listening! 

Lillian Gordis