Recording complete: Bach & Abel
We have successfully completed the recording sessions for a new album of chamber music for viola da gamba and historical keyboards, performed by Anders Muskens (harpsichord and fortepiano) and Evan Buttar (viola da gamba). The program brings together works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johann Christian Bach, and Carl Friedrich Abel, tracing a particularly revealing moment when musical style—and instrumental practice—was in rapid transition. The recordings were completed at the University of Tübingen with the support of the Musicology Institute.
This repertoire is compelling precisely because it sits at a stylistic crossroads. J.S. Bach’s gamba sonata represents the late Baroque at its most intricate and rhetorically engaged, while the music of J.C. Bach and Abel points toward the galant, Empfindsamkeit, and early-Classical idioms: greater transparency of texture, elegant melodic writing, and a different sense of sentimental immediacy. Heard together, these works illuminate both continuity and change. Abel’s sonatas are especially striking in this context, written for an instrument whose prominence was already declining, yet one that still offered an exceptionally emotional and intimate expressive world.
The project also takes inspiration from the Bach–Abel concerts in London, among the city’s most prominent musical events in the later 18th century. In keeping with that soundworld, the sessions used period-appropriate instruments, including original English square pianos from the 1780s and a Broadwood/Shudi harpsichord.
Repertoire recorded
J.S. Bach — Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord in D major, BWV 1028
J.C. Bach — Sonata for viola da gamba and keyboard obligato in G major, Warb B:4b
C.F. Abel — Sonata for viola da gamba and basso continuo in E minor, WKO 150 A2:7
J.C. Bach — Sonata for viola da gamba and keyboard obligato in F major, Warb B:15b
C.F. Abel — Sonata for viola da gamba and basso continuo in A minor, A2:57A
C.F. Abel — Sonata for viola da gamba and basso continuo in F major, A2:70
Post-production is now underway (with producer Jakub Klimes). This project was supported by the Canada Council for the Arts: https://canadacouncil.ca.