by Ticco AMAR (Violin) and GUNTHER RAMIN (Cembalo)
Relayed from the Bishopsgate Institute
TICCO AMAR, the violinist in this recital of music, as fresh and wholesome as it is unfamiliar, is already well known to listeners as the leader of the Quartet which boars his name side by side with that of Hindemith, the brilliant viola player and composer.
Gunther Ramin is the organist in the Thomaskirche of Leipzig, the Church which the great Bach himself made famous for all time. There is thus a special interest in having a great organ Prelude and Fugue of the master's, played by one who is, musically, his direct lineal descendant, as well as being a distinguished upholder of his great tradition.
If for nothing else, Buxtehude would be remembered as one of the masters whose music was sincerely studied by the great Bach. It formed a very important part of that tradition which Bach made the starting point of his own splendid music. But as an organist himself, and as composer of organ and church music, he has a place of real honour in the history both of the instrument and of music. A Swede by birth, he spent a good part of his life in Germany, dying at Lübeck in 1707. ! Pisendel was a pupil of Corelli's, who was master of his instrument at so early an age that, when he was only fifteen he became one of the Chapel violinists to the Margrave of Ansbach. He was afterwards Director of Music to the King of Poland, and then spent some years in the suite of the Prince of Saxony, travelling throughout Europe with his master. The last years of his life were spent as leader of the orchestra at the Saxon Court, and in the Opera Orchestra, and ! ho died there, in Dresden, in 1755. He was among the best of the early eighteenth-century violinists, and had a good deal to do with raising the art to a high level in Germany. As listeners will hear in this Sonata for violin without accompaniment, he must, indeed, have been a master of his instrument and all its resources.