Rosenmüller Sonatas 1682 – Musica Fiata/Wilson

A trombonist chased out of Leipzig on a morals charge ends up in the doge’s own basilica, and German instrumental music is never quite the same. There’s a lesson in there somewhere about the uses of exile.

Johann Rosenmüller’s twelve sonatas of 1682 are late fruit. The composer was already in his sixties, his Venetian decades behind him, writing back toward Germany the lessons he’d absorbed at St. Mark’s under maestri who were themselves absorbing the new dramatic language spilling out of the opera houses. You can hear Cavalli’s ghost in these pages, and Legrenzi’s more directly: the sectional freedom, the way a stately opening can pivot without warning into a galloping tripla, then subside again into something almost devotional. None of these pieces runs long. The longest clocks in around eight minutes, and most say what they need to in five or less. But brevity here isn’t a limitation. It’s a structural principle, terse paragraphs of music stacked one against another, sometimes five or six sections deep, each with its own tempo, its own affect, its own instrumental color.

Musica Fiata plays them with real understanding of that logic. This is a twelve-piece band drawing on chitarrone, bass viol, dulcian (that buzzing, reedy ancestor of the bassoon), violins, cornetti (the booklet’s “Zinken,” a nice bit of German bluntness), and a consort of early trombones, the instrument Rosenmüller himself once played for his supper. The variety of scoring across the disc is one of its chief pleasures, though it does mean, as I found on a second and third hearing, that you resist listening straight through in numbered order. Programmed as sequenced here — Sonata IX a 5, then Sonata V a 3, then Sonata XII a 5 — the ear stays alert precisely because the forces keep shifting under it.

Sonata IX opens with a gravity that a lesser ensemble would smear into mush; here the entries are cleanly spaced, the intonation of the cornetti bright without being acidic. No small feat, since a poorly played zink can sound like a duck with a head cold. The five-part sonorities glow rather than blare. Sonata V, scored down to three real parts plus continuo, is leaner and more searching harmonically, Rosenmüller reaching for chromatic surprise in a way that looks forward, oddly, to Buxtehude’s more inward moments. And the dulcian in the group’s other big five-voice sonata (not among the three excerpted for discussion here, but audible in context on the full disc) growls with real character, an arresting, slightly comic color that the Italians themselves loved and that German composers were only beginning to exploit.

Ornamentation throughout is tasteful, never showy. Trills and passing figures are added with what sounds like genuine improvisatory freedom rather than the buttoned-down “authentic” ornament-by-the-book manner some period bands fall into. Balance is outstanding; continuo realizations breathe rather than plod.

Competition exists, and it’s worth naming. The Rare Fruits Council under Manfredo Kraemer, on an Ambronay disc I reviewed some years back, sets Rosenmüller alongside Legrenzi and Stradella, a smart bit of programming that lets you hear the family resemblance and measure Rosenmüller’s individuality against his Italian contemporaries in real time. That disc has more bite, more theatrical snap. This CPO release, by contrast, prizes warmth and blend; Musica Fiata’s approach is rounder, more consciously exquisite, occasionally at the cost of rhythmic edge. I don’t think one approach cancels the other. I’d want both on the shelf.

What’s certain is that Rosenmüller deserves to be more than a footnote, more than “the pederast who fled to Venice,” which is how music history has too often filed him. He heard Cesti’s operas, presumably rubbed shoulders with Schütz’s legacy, played under the same domes as singers trained in a tradition Monteverdi had shaped a generation earlier. These sonatas are the residue of all that listening, filtered through a craftsman’s hand and, in these performances anyway, given the loving, unshowy advocacy they’ve long needed. Recommended, with the Kraemer disc as ideal companion rather than rival.