Luogo e data di registrazione		Séon (Svizzera) - novembre 1977
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Johann-Nikolaus Matthes
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 065-30 944 Q - (1 lp) - durata 50' 01" - (p) 1978 - Analogico (Quadraphonic)
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26513 2 - (1 cd) - durata 50' 01" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

Silvius Leopold Veiß (1686-1750) is without question the most important lutenist of the German baroque and one of the greatest of all time. His historical significance would be firmly established by virtue of his enormous output alone, for he left over seventy sonatas (suites) in tablature, by far the largest corpus of music for solo lute of any composer in the history of the instrument. However, the quantity of these sonatas is matched by their quality. In 1782 Bach’s biographer Forkel praised the “excellent and difficult compositions” of Weiß, “which are written in the pure and pithy style, much like the harpsichord works of the late J. S. Bach.” Born in Breslau, weiß learned to play the lute as a boy from his father Johann Jakob, as did Silvius’ younger brother Johann Sigismund. Virtually nothing is known about the weiß family until the two young lutenists were engaged at the Palatinate court in Düsseldorf in 1706. Two years later Silvius accompanied the Polish Prince Alexander Sobiesky to Italy, where the two remained until the Prince’s death in 1714. This Italian sojourn had a profound impact on Weiß's musical style, since the music he composed afterwards show a strong influence of Italian concerto elements. ln 1717 Weiß appeared at the court of August the Strong, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony in Dresden. A year later he was permanently attached to the Dresden Hofcapelle, and kept the position of court lutenist there for the rest of his life. By 1744 he was the highest-paid instrumentalist in the Hofcapelle, a measure of the esteem in which he was held by his sovereign. Weiß’s fame was not restricted to the Dresden court, however. As early as 1713 the prominent Hamburg critic and composer Johann Mattheson described Weiß as "a perfect musician," and in 1728 as “the greatest lutenist in the world,” though Weiß was known to him almost exclusively by reputation. In his Study of the Lute (1727), Ernst Gottlieb Baron raves for two pages about Weiß's accomplishments: “I can sincerely testify that it makes no difference whether one hears an ingenious organist performing his fantasias and fugues on a harpsichord or hears Monsieur Weiß playing.” This great skill and renown drew lute students to Dresden from all over Germany and from as far away as Russia. Through this personal contact and through the wide circulation of his pieces in manuscript, Weiß’s influence on the younger generation of lutenists was considerable. Yet despite this fame, little information survives todaz about his appearance, his familz, or his personal affairs. The onlz likeness of him, the engraving reproduced here, was made in the eighteenth century after a contemporary painting by the great portraitist Balthasar Denner. The painting, now lost, was probably executed in about 1730. In approximately 1720 Weiß married, and had seven children by his death in 1750; at least two of them were talented musicians. Though he was well paid, he apparently lived rather too well, since his family was destitute after his death. Of his personality, one old anecdote is perhaps characteristic: “In the fiftieth year of his life (1736) the great lutenist Weiß answered the question of how long he had been playing the lute with "twenty years". One of his friends, who knew for certain that Weiß already was playing the lute in his tenth year, wanted to contradict him, but he interrupted and said, "True, but for twenty years I was tuning." Weiß's musical style is, like that of Bach, a German synthesis of the French and Italian baroque styles. Weiß was doubtless familiar with suites by the great French baroque lutenists Gaultier, Gallot, Mouton, and so forth, and with the modified French music composed during the late 17th century by the German lutenists Esaias Reusner, Jakob Büttner, and Philip Franz LeSage de Richée. From them, and perhaps more directly from Count Losy, Weiß adopted the dance suite. In Italy, and doubtless also through the influence of the Italian musicians at the Dresden court, Weiß refined his style, adopting cantabile elements, increasing the force of harmonic propulsion, and extending the length of most sonata movements. The result is an individual style that nonetheless sounds much like Bach’s, although the two greatest masters of their respective instruments probably did not meet personally betore 1720 (one documented meeting at Bach’s house in Leipzig took place in 1739) and had little apparent influence on each other. Most of Weiß’s music is arranged in the form of dance suites, which in his manuscripts are always referred to as Suonaten or Partien. The order of movements in the sonatas is typically the following: prelude (optional), allemande, courante, bourrée, sarabande, minuet, gigue or allegro, but substitutions for one or more of the movements occur frequently. Some pieces - two tombeaux, a variety of fantasias, and so forth - appear to have been conceived independently of the sonata. A few four-movement sonatas for lute and bowed strings also survive, but unfortunately all are missing the string parts. Weiß’s career can be divided into three major periods of activity, with respect to the development of his style. The early period extends to about 1715, when he returned to Germany from Italy. The middle period documents his activity during his first years in Dresden, until about 1725, and is characterized by strong influx of the Italianate elements enumerated above. Approximately fifteen sonatas survive from the last twenty-five years of Weilß’s life, and in them he continued to refine the style of his middle period. The music on the present recording is representative of the best works of the middle period. The Sonata in D minor was probably composed in Dresden in the early 1720’s, perhaps partly for pedagogical reasons, since a note in a student`s hand of Weiß’s autograph manuscript indicates: “This was the first partita I learned with Monsieur Weiß". The prelude is unbarred but falls neatly into phrases in common time. The running sixteenth-note figurations essentially constitute a long sequence of broken chords, not unlike the first prelude in Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier. In the allemande, by contrast, the emphasis is less on harmony than on the languishing melody; this piece is really an aria for lute. The courante and bourrée are again more instrumental in character, both vigorous dances designed to provide momentum between the more solemn allemande and sarabande. The two minuets, here played as a single minuet en rondeau, are quick, lighthearted movements, the sarabrindc contemplative, and the gigue a rollicking finale. One of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces in the entire history of lute music is the Tombeau on the Death of Count Losy. Count Jan Antonín Losy von Losinthal (1650-1721) was a landed Bohemian aristocrat of Austrian heritage, an Imperial Court Chamberlain, and the most highly respected German baroque lutenist before Weiß, Weiß had undoubtedly met Losy personally in Vienna or Prague, and may have studied with him for a time in his youth. As a tribute to Losy upon his death, Weiß conceived a piece in the key of B-flat minor, an unusual and difficult key on the lute because of the many barres it necessitates at the first fret. The wistful character of this tombeau is established by means of frequent diminished seventh chords and other dissonances, and by the slow pace. A particularly elegiac effect is created by the bass pedal point at the verybeginning and by other repeated notes, which are obviously intended to suggest the tolling of funeral bells. The C minor prelude on this recording is one of Weiß’s boldest experiments in shocking harmonies and chromaticism. It seems to have been composed about 1720, although in style it more resembles music written nearly a half-century later. The autograph manuscript of this prelude, from which Hopkinson Smith plays, is sketched out rapidly, which implies that it may represent an improvisatory composition. This impression of improvisation is supported by the predominance of very free, irregular rhythms reminiscent of the 17th-century French unmeasured prelude. Weiß here makes unusually extensive use of the diminished seventh chord, an ambiguous harmony, and includes a long passage based upon a cleverly disguised chromatically descending octave in the bass. The mood created by these devices is unsettling, almost schizophrenic, and is very atypical for Weiß and late baroque music in general. By contrast, the Fantasie in C minor that follows is much more conventional in conception. The first half consists of even, arpeggiated figurations in the manner of a prelude, and the second half of a fugato with a long, sequential episode between the entries of the theme. The present Sonata in D major is comprised of various movements from the Weiß manuscript in the British Library. The prelude, like the others on this recording, is unbarred, with passages of running arpeggios alternating with block chords over a pedal point. The Aria is another allemande with strongly vocal characteristics, its long, spunout melody full of pathos and frequent sigh figures. The courante is like a movement from a Vivaldi concerto in its rapid figurations and relentless forward propulsion. Like the allemandes on this recording, the D major sarabande is operatic in inspiration, with pathetic sigh figures and a few virtuoso flourishes. The passagaille (passacaglia) consists of a theme and eleven variations, of which the last is a slightly more ornate version of the theme. The bass remains the same in all variations, but the melody is transformed by elaborate embellishments. A particularly ingenious feature of this passacaglia is the length of the theme - an uneven seven measures; the first measure of each successive variation is at the same time the last measure of the preceding one, thereby filling it out to a total of eight. A lively gigue provides an appropriate finale. Douglas Alton Smith The Widhalm lute is similar to an aged aristocratic general, the hero of battles long since fought, still with an elegant and proud bearing, but also, no longer the tactician he once was. The strengths of the instrument - apart from the amazing phenomenon that it has survived in playing condition without restoration - lie in its wonderfully rich bsss register and in the clear singing quality of the upper strings (the first five courses were strung in gut for this recording). Less strong qualities include a middle register with less power than it probably had originally and also a mild stubbornness on the part of the instrument in lighter movements whose agile passagework could have been more clearly realized on a more flexible modern instrument. The decision on my part to use an original instrument does not come from any self-righteous assertion that the music of a particular period is “supposed” to sound in one specific way and that we must therefore adhere to burdensome “rules” of a time and style. It comes rather from, first of all, a natural curiosity to see what old instruments are like - so few are in playable condition and they can normally be borrowed only for a specific project - and secondly, the desire to see just how this instrument and this music would adapt to each other. This project remains as much a document of a magnificent 18th century lute (the first to be recorded, I believe) as it is a testament to the greatest 18th century Iutenist composer. Three notes on the programming: 1) In the Dresden Weiß Manuscript version of the D minor Suite, what is here played as a minuet en rondeau is copied out as two distinct Minuets separated by the Sarabande. I have chosen rather to make one more substantial piece out of the two and to build n more dramatic pacing into the suite by pairing the Sarabande with the Gigue. 2) The Prélude and Fantasy in C minor are also separated in the British Museum Weiß Ms from which they come, but are here combined. Out of the turmoil of harmonic instability of the Prélude, enters the unmeasured but more stable opening of an old friend, the C minor Fantasie, one of the best known lute pieces of Weiß. 3) The last suite is a regrouping of some of the best pieces in D major from different parts of the British Museum Ms. Despite their dispersion in the manuscript, there are thematic similarities between the movements (especially the Aria and Sarabande), and they fit together into a well proportioned suite. Hopkinson Smith
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"