IX Tallinn feat. Reval – Experimental Baroque

Programme: J. Klein der Junger, J. S. Bach, G. Ph. Telemann, J. Ph. Rameau

Pavel Serbin – baroque cello (Hungary)
Reinut Tepp – harpsichord

This programme is devoted to the baroque cello repertoire and to 18th-century composers seeking new compositional techniques and contexts. As a solo instrument, the cello was still a fairly new phenomenon at the time: the first printed cello sonatas appeared in Italy around 1697. It took some time before composers began to take the instrument seriously. The second printed “oeuvre” was a collection of sonatas for the Basse de violon (one of the names then used for the cello), published in Amsterdam in 1717 by the Dutch businessman Jacob Klein der Jünger. Klein called himself an amateur, but he was a highly accomplished cellist and a composer of exceptional imagination, whose compositional fantasy seemed to have no limits. Taking Corelli’s style as a model, he drew on features of the older 17th-century stylus phantasticus. His innovative harmonic ideas are combined with the cello’s various discordato tunings.

The programme’s second theme is the art of transcription. We have selected a brilliant, but nowadays rather little-known collection for two cellos (cello and basso continuo), published in Paris around 1750. It contains well-known folk tunes (such as “Fürstemberg”) and excerpts from Rameau’s operas, arranged by an unknown author. The pieces have not simply been transposed into another key and adapted for the cello; the melodies have also been varied and modified.

The programme’s third theme is a contemporary experiment with transcriptions. The aim was not to recompose the work or turn it into a collage, as Michael Nyman (born 1944) has done, for example, but to seek its historical background. Of G. Ph. Telemann’s 12 fantasias for viola da gamba, four may originally have been intended for the cello. “Bringing them back” to their presumed original form is therefore a challenge in its own right. In J. S. Bach’s Suite No. 2, we seek to bring out its French style by placing it in the form of French pièces de viole, usually performed with a continuo bass—in this case, “for two cellos and harpsichord” (concert pour deux violoncelles et clavecin).

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