Weiss & Hasse: Lute Sonatas

Album review

It's on a superb copy of a Renaissance (1590) Venetian lute by Marx Unverdorben (and revised in the baroque era around 1750 by Gabriel David Bachstetter) that Jadran Duncumb offers us a few gems written by Hasse and Weiss – Weiss is known for gravitating into Bach's orbit, so much so that each reworked or arranged many of the other's works. Between Hasse and Weiss, we are right at the end of the golden age of the lute, which was soon to disappear from view for centuries, only to resurface later in the hands of fans of a music that couldn't really be played on any other instrument. Because writing for lute – most commonly in the form of tablature, which already limits the possibilities for crossover work with other instrumentalists, who almost never know how to read tablature – is specific to the instrument, and its fairly limited harmonic part-writing transfers rather poorly to the keyboard, for example. This being said, the two pieces by Hasse are in fact period transpositions from the clavier to the lute, with the loss of some harmonic elements compensated by the greater possibilities for phrasing and dynamics on a lute than on a harpsichord. © SM/Qobuz