Weiss Lute Sonatas – Robert Barto

Somewhere in Dresden, around 1720, a lutenist good enough to make violinists jealous was drawing a salary that rivaled the concertmaster’s. That was Weiss. He wrote nothing for print, almost nothing for anyone but himself and a small circle of pupils, and yet he left behind something like six hundred works.

Robert Barto has been the patient excavator of this material for Naxos for the better part of two decades now, and volume eleven finds him in typically unhurried, unglamorous command. There is nothing flashy about his stage manner on disc. No engineered spotlight, no artificial resonance pumped in to flatter a notoriously quiet instrument. Just the lute, close-miked, breathing.

The Sonata No. 39 in C, called the Partita Grande by whoever first bound it into a manuscript, opens the program with an overture cast in the Lullian mold: dotted rhythms stiff with French formality, then a fugal allegro that scampers off before the ceremony gets too heavy. Tim Crawford’s dating of the piece to the 1740s feels right to my ear; there’s a harmonic wanderlust in the later movements, a willingness to modulate into shadow, that suggests a composer no longer proving himself. Barto stretches the overture’s dotted figures further than some rival lutenists — Nigel North, say, in his older recordings — daring the pulse to go slack. It doesn’t. The tension holds because Barto understands that in Weiss, rubato is architecture, not decoration.

Twenty-eight minutes for one sonata. That is a lot of lute to sustain listener attention through, and I confess my mind wandered once or twice in the middle dances, a bourrée here, a minuet there, doing their courtly duty without much urgency. But the closing gigue snaps everything back into focus, all cross-string leaps and sudden hesitations, played with a rhythmic wit that had me smiling in my listening chair.

The G major work, No. 96, is the odd one out: plainer, sparer, almost pedagogical in its restraint. It comes down to us via Timofei Bielogradsky, Weiss’s Russian pupil, in a manuscript now sitting in Moscow, a reminder that this music traveled further and stranger routes than we usually credit. Barto plays it without any evident sense that it’s the “easy” piece on the program. If anything he leans into its plainness, lets phrases sit unadorned, trusts the harmony to do the work the ornaments usually do elsewhere in Weiss. The sarabande in particular unfolds with a kind of unforced melancholy that never once reaches for effect.

Then the E-flat sonata, No. 30, twenty-two minutes of Weiss at his most contrapuntally ambitious: dense, occasionally knotty, demanding of both player and instrument. The lute is not naturally suited to counterpoint; too many competing voices and the ear simply loses the thread, the sound collapsing into a wash of overtone and decay. Barto navigates this with the sort of voicing control that comes only from decades of living inside this repertoire. You can hear him lean on a bass line, let it ring a half-beat longer, so the ear has something to hold onto while upper voices dance.

Is Barto’s tone exquisite? Not in the way a great guitarist’s tone is beautiful — there’s less sheer sensuous surface here, less velvet. What he has instead is clarity: attack that speaks cleanly even in the instrument’s stubbornly resonant middle register, ornaments that articulate rather than blur. Some listeners raised on the plusher approach of Konrad Junghänel or the older Julian Bream lute records may find him austere. I’d call it honest.

Recorded sound is close and dry, which suits the music. No cathedral reverb pretending this was ever concert repertoire. It wasn’t. This was music for candlelit rooms, small audiences, maybe just Weiss himself, working something out at midnight.

Eleven volumes in, Naxos’s Weiss project remains unglamorous, unhurried, and quietly indispensable. Barto is not chasing applause here. He’s paying a very old debt, one phrase at a time.