Pez: A collection featuring two genres - Duplex Genius
This collection by Johann Christoph Pez (1664-1716) is a collection of string pieces adopting both the French and Italian styles. The collection nicely fits onto one CD, with twelve sonatas in all. As the composer’s first opus, the work has an interesting history, at one point its composition being credited to Graun. The liner notes from this album by L’arpa festante provides a good history of the composer, from his start as a member of a watchtower family. Those working these jobs not only had to look out for fires, but provide music within the city. And so it went with Pez, he developed himself into a formal music career first in Munich before eventually leaving for about the last ten years of his life.
For those familiar with the string music by Biber—specifically collections like the Sacro-profanum sonatas—these are similar in construction. Each sonata is composed of alternating movements, adopting the Italian fashion. Each sonata itself, as played here, lasts between 6-7 minutes.
It’s believed the composer wrote these after spending time in Rome, where it might be assumed he rubbed elbows with the likes of Arcangelo Corelli, or at least he would have been conversant with the musical style Corelli made famous through his own publications.
Christoph Hesse (violin) is joined in this album with five other musicians, providing a quartet texture with violone, organ or harpsichord, and lute or guitar for basso continuo. The writing is flexible enough one might imagine this could have been up-scaled into a concerto grosso texture, but here it is presented as chamber music.
Pez routinely makes the two violin parts and the basso continuo the active roles among these sonatas. The harmonic language is closer to Corelli than that of Biber. The package, however, is a bit more German in flavor. The other collection that came to mind as I auditioned these sonatas were the parties by Johann Pachelbel published in 1695 as his Musicalische Ergötzung. N.B. The recording I have of Pachelbel, performed by London Baroque, features the same painting on the cover of that album as this one!
The performances from L’arpa festante is supportive and up to the technical challenges of the music. Pez is almost unkind in dropping run-away sections, but the ensemble does equally well at the fast and furious as they do in the slow sections, the delicious Corellian suspensions included. On an expressive level, there's more potential, especially from the two upper parts.
For my taste, the recording’s balance favors the continuo over the violins; ideally I’d like to be one step closer to the musicians, and I would have separated the two violins for a more stereophonic effect between the left and right sides.
As far as recordings of Pez’s music go, there’s not a lot recorded, and this a strong contribution to the catalog.
