The fire that swept through the Rudolstadt court library in 1735 is one of those calamities that music history keeps inflicting on us, like the losses of Vivaldi’s manuscripts or the destruction wrought on so many Central European archives during the last war. Philipp Heinrich Erlebach — music director at that Thuringian court for more than three decades — lost nearly everything he had written. What survives is small enough to fit on a single CD, which is precisely what we have here, and it is enough to make you genuinely angry at what the flames took.
Not famous. Not forgotten exactly — the name appears in the reference books — but effectively absent from the repertoire and from most listeners’ experience. That is a shame worth dwelling on for a moment before getting to the music itself.
Because the music is remarkable.
Erlebach spent his career in what amounted to a provincial backwater, however agreeable the Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt court may have been to its inhabitants. Yet he was clearly absorbing everything happening around him — the French ouverture style that Lully had systematized and that German composers from Telemann to the young Bach were eagerly appropriating, the Italian cantata manner, the emerging conventions of the trio sonata. The Overture No. 2 in b-flat major, heard here in what is apparently its first recording, announces all of this at once. The opening’s dotted rhythms have exactly that formal, slightly stiff-legged grandeur the French style demands — you can almost smell the candle wax — and the fugal sections that follow show a composer who understood counterpoint not as an obligation but as a pleasure.
What strikes you repeatedly, listening to this program, is Erlebach’s feeling for proportion. Nothing outstays its welcome. The Sonata Terza in a major, one of six trio sonatas that represent his most substantial surviving instrumental legacy, unfolds across six movements with the unhurried confidence of someone who knows exactly when to turn a corner. The ciaccona that anchors the work builds its variations with a logic that feels inevitable in retrospect, the bass line a kind of gravitational constant around which the upper voices — violin and viola da gamba, played here with lovely unanimity of purpose — trace their increasingly elaborate orbits.
Miriam Feuersinger brings to “Meine Seufzer” a tone that is warm without being plummy, and her ornaments land with the kind of naturalness that comes from actually knowing this repertoire rather than just navigating it. The text is about sighs and lamentation — Erlebach sets it with a chromatic restlessness in the harmony that suggests he had been listening to Buxtehude, among others. Franz Vitzthum’s countertenor in “Trocknet euch ihr heißen Zähren” is one of those voices that makes the whole question of vocal classification seem temporarily irrelevant. Clear, focused, unforced — he doesn’t push against the phrase, he inhabits it.
The closing duet, “Süße Freundschaft, edles Band,” is where the disc earns its title and its keep. The two voices intertwine so naturally that the ear stops trying to separate them, which is presumably Erlebach’s point — sweet friendship, precious bond, the text says, and the music means it. You could argue this is the finest thing on the disc. I’d probably argue it.
Peter Barczi and the Capricornus Consort Basel play throughout with a clarity and rhythmic vitality that never tips into the mechanical precision that can make period-instrument reading sound like a demonstration rather than an experience. The continuo work deserves particular mention — the balance between the plucked instruments and the keyboard is one of those things that’s very hard to get right and very easy to get wrong, and here it sounds, session after session, like a single harmonic intelligence.
For those keeping a catalog of Erlebach recordings — an admittedly specialized pursuit — the Chicago Baroque Ensemble’s account of the trio sonatas on Centaur is worth tracking down, and there are reasonable performances of the ouvertures from Berliner Barock Compagney on Capriccio, though the acoustic on that disc tends to swallow detail that ought to be audible. CPO has done useful work with the cantatas.
But this is the album I’d start with, and very likely the one I’d return to. Erlebach deserved better from history. He gets it here.
