Alexander Paine
organ

OCT 18^th
6:00 p.m.
Ponta do Sol, Igreja de Nossa Senhora da Luz

Programme:

Dieterich Buxtehude (1637-1707)
¬ Canzona, BuxWV 166

Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621)
¬ Pavana hispanica

Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612)
¬ Canzon in F

Johann Pachelbel (1653-1706)
¬ Fuga in C major

Johann Caspar Kerll (1627-1693)
¬ Toccata cromatica con durezze e ligature

Georg Muffat (1653-1704)
¬ Passacaglia

Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710)
¬ Toccata con lo scherzo del cucco

Giovanni Salvatore (1620-1688)
¬ Canzone francese seconda, del nono tuono naturale

Domenico Zipoli (1688-1726)
¬ Canzona in F major
¬ Al post Comunio

Maurice Greene (1696-1755)
¬ Voluntary III in A minor
› Largo
› Andante

John Stanley (1712-1786)
¬ Voluntary II in D minor, Op. 5 n.º 2
› Slow
› Allegro

Alexander Paine (1992)
¬ Theme with variations

In 1585, a young musician named Hans Leo Hassler crossed the Alps and returned to Germany, having spent over a year studying in Venice. With him, he brought a new and dramatic compositional style: music that displayed virtuosity and invention, that treated text and dissonance with radical innovation, and that relished the lavish and the extravagant. For centuries, innovations and musical styles that have come to reshape European culture have been born in the south, from canzona and toccata, to diminution and imitation and even madrigal and opera. In this programme, we work our way from the bitter colds of Northern Europe to the far south, ever with an eye toward the preponderance of southerly musical influences. The first part of the programme features Buxtehude, Sweelinck, and the aforementioned Hassler _— composers who hailed from and were active in Denmark, the Netherlands, and north Germany, yet who were deeply influenced by southern musical idioms and styles, and even (in the case of the Pavana hispanica) sought to, in some fashion, imitate them and conjure up an image of life in a far distant land. From here, we pass to Pachelbel, Kerll, and Muffat. Muffat, in particular, deserves special mention, for like Hassler, he spent some time studying in Italy (notably with Pasquini, himself featured later in the programme), and was renowned for his dissemination of contemporaneous Italianate idioms in his own uniquely “mixed style” music. Further, the passacaglia as a musical form, as with the canzona, the toccata, and even the fugue, also hails from Europe’s south – though not from Italy – rather having its origins in early 17th-century Spain as a form of interlude, before being iterated upon by Frescobaldi and developed into its form as variations upon a ground bass. From here, we cross the Alps, with Pasquini’s delightful imitative work upon the distinctive cuckoo call (a beloved and oft-used motif in the early Baroque) and Salvatore. We then move to Zipoli, another of Pasquini’s students, who represents the southernmost point thus far in the programme, having spent the last years of his short life as a missionary in the Viceroyalty of Peru. From South America, we return north and to Europe for the final part of the concert: a selection of works from London, England’s own southerly home of culture. It is not unfair to say that English musical history has long struck its own course, distinct from continental Europe, and yet not independent from it, with Italian composers having long influenced the likes of Tallis, Purcell, and the later composers here represented. Finally, a work that is consciously imitative of this later 18th-century manner, that I wrote in 2020 in an attempt to capture something of this genteel galant style. Yet, though written in a distinctly European idiom, it is nonetheless (as am I) ultimately a product of terra australis, the southern land, and it is my privilege to present it as a part of this musical celebration of the south, in all its forms.

Alexander Paine