Fritz Sinfonias – La Stagione Frankfurt/Schneider

Nobody remembers Gaspard Fritz. That is unjust, and this disc goes some distance toward correcting the injustice, though I doubt it will get much further than the specialists and the curious.

Fritz spent his whole working life in Geneva, a city not exactly teeming with orchestral glamour in the eighteenth century, and that geographical accident may explain a great deal about his posthumous obscurity. He was not Viennese, not Mannheim, not even minor-Parisian in the way that gets you a footnote in the standard histories. He was Genevan — trained by his father, then sent off to Turin to study with Somis, one of Corelli’s own pupils by way of Vivaldi’s generation, which makes Fritz a kind of great-grandchild of the whole Italian violin tradition transplanted onto Swiss soil and fed on English money. The Common Room crowd — those expatriate English families who treated Geneva as a finishing school with mountain views — kept him fed and fashionable. Handel, no soft touch when it came to praising rivals, thought well enough of the op. 1 sonatas to say so.

The two op. 1 works included here — the Sinfonia in A and the Sinfonia in F — are not really sinfonias at all, whatever the disc’s title insists. They were published in London in 1742 as Sonate a quattro stromenti, chamber pieces for two violins, viola, and continuo, and the three-movement plan gives them away instantly: this is drawing-room music dressed up, gracious rather than grand, built for a handful of players in a candlelit room rather than a public hall. La Stagione Frankfurt, under Michael Schneider, plays them with a full string band anyway, which is defensible — doubling was common practice — but it does shift the character of the music somewhat, filling out textures that were probably conceived leaner, more transparent, more conversational.

The op. 6 works, composed later, are a different animal — bigger-boned, more ambitious in their contrapuntal writing, closer to what we’d actually call symphonic thinking by midcentury standards. The G minor is the highlight of the whole program, a work of real gravity, its opening movement full of the kind of restless minor-mode agitation you find in early Haydn or in J.C. Bach at his most serious. Schneider’s band finds real bite here — the bows dig in, there’s grit in the lower strings, and the harpsichord continuo (not always audible, but present, ticking along like a good clock) gives the argument a spine.

I’ll confess some hesitation about the whole enterprise, structurally speaking. Five works, spanning roughly a decade and a half of a composer’s development, arranged not chronologically but for contrast of key and mood — G major, A major, G minor, F major, F major again. It makes for a pleasant sequence of listening but tells you nothing about how Fritz grew as a composer, which strikes me as a missed opportunity on a disc explicitly billing itself as a survey of “different stages in his career.” A booklet essay, however well researched — and this one is unusually well researched, drawing on Burney’s Geneva diary entries and the Concert Spirituel reception — can only do so much to compensate for a track list that scrambles the chronology.

Schneider’s tempos throughout tend toward the brisk, sometimes almost hurried — the finale of the F major op. 6,5 goes by so fast you barely register the modulations before they’re gone. I missed a little more air, a little more room for the phrasing to breathe, particularly in the slow movements, which Fritz writes with a real gift for long-limbed melody — closer in spirit to the galant Italians than to the fussier North German style his father presumably passed down. La Stagione’s playing is clean, well-tuned, technically unimpeachable — period strings without excessive vinegar, winds (where used) blending rather than poking through. It is not a flashy album. It does not attempt rediscovery-with-fireworks. It simply lays the case before you, tidily, and lets you decide.

Do we need Fritz in our lives? Probably not urgently. But Burney’s report of the old violinist still playing “with as much spirit as a young man of twenty-five” stuck with me as I listened — there is a case to be made that some of that late-life fire survives in these scores, particularly the G minor, and it would be a shame if this disc turned out to be the last word rather than the first.