Sylvius Leopold Weiss
Sylvius Leopold Weiss left the largest known body of music for the lute: late Baroque sonatas, fantasias and concertos of intricate counterpoint and singing line, still claimed by classical guitar and mandolin as well as the period instrument.
Most of the surviving pieces are multi-movement solo sonatas, many written for the thirteen-course lute he helped establish. He also wrote concertos and chamber music and served as lutenist and theorbist at the Dresden court, where his playing sat beside the leading instrumentalists of the age. One sonata underlies Bach’s Trio BWV 1025. The Tombeau on the death of Comte de Logy remains among his best-known single works. On modern programmes the writing arrives as graceful, densely voiced Baroque repertoire for plucked strings.
Compositions by Sylvius Leopold Weiss appear on
Cosmosis
The album explores the many combinations throat singing can take. Dean Frenkel pairs overtone singing with a children’s choir, guitar and mandolin, Australian birds, contemporary piano, vibraphone duet, and a female vocal duo in song form.
Melbourne Mandolin Orchestra
A prize-winning Melbourne Mandolin Orchestra programme of easy-listening classical works, with guitar soloist Slava Grigoryan and other featured players under Fred Witt.
In Flight
Classical guitarist Harold Gretton offers a varied programme spanning some three centuries of solo guitar music, from Sylvius Leopold Weiß in the eighteenth century to his own Australian bird-inspired pieces of the twenty-first.