There is something almost perversely logical about building an entire recital around a single formal procedure — the passacaglia, that ancient and inexhaustible device of a repeating bass line bearing variations aloft — and then trusting the procedure itself to generate all the variety you need. Matthias Havinga has done exactly that, and the gamble pays off.
The passacaglia’s roots go back at least to early seventeenth-century dance music, and the form seems to have migrated northward from Spain and Italy into the German organ tradition with something like the force of a theological conviction. By the time Dieterich Buxtehude was working in Lübeck — holding that extraordinary post that would later lure the young Bach to walk two hundred miles in the dead of winter just to hear him play — the passacaglia had become a vehicle for sustained, almost architectural meditation. Havinga grasps this. His playing of Buxtehude’s Passacaglia in d minor has real gravity to it, each return of the bass not a mechanical inevitability but something closer to a pulse, organic and slightly surprising each time.
Johann Kaspar Kerll is the name on this program most listeners will draw a blank on. Unjustly. His Passacaglia in d minor is a remarkable piece, compact and harmonically adventurous for its time, and it illuminates how thoroughly the form had been absorbed into the south German Catholic tradition before Bach synthesized everything. Havinga plays it with appropriate directness — no sentimentality, clean articulation — and it lands.
Then Bach himself. The Passacaglia and Fugue in c minor, BWV 582, is one of the towering structures in all of keyboard music — an opinion that has not dimmed with familiarity, or at least shouldn’t have. The question with any reading is how the performer handles the cumulative logic of those twenty variations before the fugue arrives to transform the ostinato theme into something stranger and freer. Havinga’s approach here is not the relentlessly additive one you hear from some players, where each variation simply gets louder and the whole thing turns into an organ demonstration. He breathes. He allows certain variations to recede, to turn inward, so that the surges outward feel earned rather than mechanical. The fugue itself is taut, the counterpoint voiced with unusual clarity — individual lines stay audible even at full registration, which is harder than it sounds.
Couperin’s “Passacaille” from the Huitième Ordre is, as Havinga acknowledges, something of an outlier here. Couperin’s rondeau-passacaille is a French thing, ornamental and elegant, not quite doing what the German examples do with the bass. It’s gorgeous music — Couperin always is — but it stands a little apart from the rest of the program, a Versailles garden dropped into a Hanseatic streetscape. Havinga’s registration for it is perhaps a touch too heavy, though his ornamentation is stylish and unforced.
The young Mendelssohn’s Passacaglia in c minor, written in 1823 when he was all of fourteen, is fascinating as a document even if it isn’t quite a masterpiece. The boy had absorbed the north German contrapuntal tradition with the ease of someone drinking water, and the piece shows it — a little stiff in places, but already capable of real harmonic surprises. Havinga treats it as the serious piece it is, not as a curiosity.
Max Reger’s Introduktion und Passacaglia opens the disc with a kind of declaration of intent — Reger always declared intent with something approaching ferocity. The piece is extravagant, chromatic to the edge of incoherence, and unrelentingly demanding on the player. Havinga is more than equal to the technical requirements. The runs are clean under pressure, the climaxes properly overwhelming without turning into noise.
The Shostakovich transcription — drawn from Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, that brutal and magnificent opera Stalin famously walked out on in 1936 — is, for me, the disc’s most compelling single track. The music is dark in a way that has nothing to do with minor keys and everything to do with psychological atmosphere. The bitonality here isn’t a compositional exercise; it sounds like dread. Havinga’s orchestral registrations add to the sensation without overplaying it.
Jan Welmers, born 1937, is represented by a 1965 Passacaglia that pushes the form close to dissolution — sustained tones interrupted by what sound like random flourishes, the underlying bass structure deliberately obscured. It is unsettling in ways that may frustrate listeners who come to the passacaglia precisely for its audible architecture. I find it interesting rather than convincing, but it belongs here.
This is a thoughtful, well-played recital by a artist who clearly knows what he wants to say. Havinga’s artistry is not the issue — it never is. The question is always musical intelligence, and that is on consistent display throughout. Recommended without reservation.
