MUSIC

Dunedin Consort

Glasgow Cathedral

Keith Bruce

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THE opening concert of this year’s Glasgow Cathedral Festival was an attempt to put in context the compositions of a lost “Scot”, Georg Muffat, whose ancestors may well have come from Dumfriesshire, but whose entire life was spent in Central Europe. In fact it was rather more than that.

While early Western choral music is now widely heard and appreciated – and Scotland’s Dunedin Consort has been a key part of that process – its parallel instrumental writing, beyond a few well-loved favourites by Bach and Vivaldi, rarely commands the same audience. And yet the roots of both modern chamber music and the orchestral repertoire lie here, and hence everything from pop and rock groups to film soundtracks. In placing Muffat in the company of his contemporaries, this edition of the Dunedin Consort, led by violinist Matthew Truscott, was painting a much larger picture.

Muffat was represented by the first and final sonatas from his Armonico Tributo, published in Salzburg in 1682, which illustrated his own internationalism, the former full of Italian and French influences, while the latter ends with a magnificent, complex, Passacaglia that prefigures Bach.

Although this five-part (plus harpsichord) writing is only a viola more than a string quartet, it is very much broader and proto-orchestral than intimate small group composition, a characteristic it shared with the Francesco Navarra quintet that opened the recital, and in which the keyboard was even less discernible.

By contrast Viennese violinist Johann Heinrich Schmelzer’s Fechtschule (Fencing School), which began the second half, was much more in the realm of chamber music, although with the harpsichord again mostly irrelevant.

The finest compositions of the concert, perhaps unsurprisingly, were by Heinrich Biber. Truscott revelled in the menagerie of animal impressions that is his Sonata Representativa, with cellist Jonathan Manson assisting in the portrayal of birds, frogs and cats – a gentler side to his better-known Battalia pictorialism. Less gimmicky and more lyrical was his Balletti Lamentabile quartet, a six part suite with a sparky Gigue, but mostly an example of very early chill-out music.