By Kevin McLaughlin
The Rocky River Chamber Music Society welcomed the Pittsburgh-based early-music ensemble Chatham Baroque on Friday, March 2, for a program of 17th and 18th century sonatas from the German-speaking world.
Performed at West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church, the concert traced a path from the courts of Vienna and Salzburg to North German towns and, eventually to London. The three musicians played with distinction, vitality, and an easy rapport.
Founded in 1990, Chatham Baroque includes Andrew Fouts (violin), Patricia Halverson (viola da gamba), and Scott Pauley (archlute and theorbo). Even by period-instrument standards, the ensemble has a distinctive sound: violin and viola da gamba often share the lead, supported by the quiet plucked resonance of the lutes.
The program opened with the J.S. Bach’s Sonata in G, BWV 1021, one of the composer’s few works for violin and continuo. Written around 1732 but not discovered until 1929, the manuscript survives in the handwriting of Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, who copied the music while Bach supplied the titles and figured bass. The sonata follows the familiar church-sonata pattern of alternating slow and fast movements.
Fouts shaped the opening Adagio with quiet restraint, letting the line reveal itself simply over Halverson and Pauley’s steady continuo. In the quicker movements the players found an easy rhythmic flow. The theorbo’s soft resonance and the gamba’s warm bass created a texture lighter and more transparent than most ensembles, whether modern or baroque.
Dietrich Buxtehude’s Sonata in a, Op. 1 No. 3 places the violin and gamba on equal footing. Buxtehude, the Lübeck organist whose reputation drew the young J.S. Bach north on a famously long walk in the snow, wrote chamber sonatas in the stylus fantasticus, a free and rhetorical style that favors a sequence of contrasting sections.
Fouts and Halverson echoed and challenged each other, their lines sometimes converging in tight counterpoint before separating again into independent gestures.
A shift came with Carl Friedrich Abel’s Sonata No. 7 in B-flat, by one of the last great virtuosos of the viola da gamba. Abel spent much of his career in London, where he collaborated with Bach’s son Johann Christian on an influential concert series.
The B-flat sonata belongs to his later years and reflects the lighter galant style of the mid-eighteenth century. Halverson carried the melodic line with understated elegance, letting the instrument’s mellow color speak in the Adagio before closing the piece with a poised Menuet.
Music by Johann Heinrich Schmelzer returned the program to the seventeenth century. A central figure at the Habsburg court in Vienna and likely mentor to Heinrich Biber, Schmelzer helped establish the violin as a virtuoso instrument north of Italy. His Sonata quarta, from a 1664 collection, unfolds over a descending four-note ground bass that generates a series of variations and dances.
Fouts navigated his part with ease — quick arpeggiated flourishes, sudden rhythmic turns, and a final rhapsodic passage so flamboyant you’d be forgiven if you thought it was improvised.
The program’s second half began with Philipp Heinrich Erlebach’s Sonata No. 1 in D by a composer whose music survives only in fragments after a fire destroyed much of his output in 1735. More’s the pity. The piece is delightful, blending Italian sonata with French dance forms.
Here again the violin and gamba functioned as equal partners. Fouts and Halverson exchanged melodic lines with quiet precision, especially in the sequence of dances where Pauley’s theorbo added a gentle rhythmic pulse.
Franz Biber’s Sonata III in F placed the violin squarely in the spotlight. Active in Salzburg, Biber was among the most daring violin composers of the Baroque, and his Mystery Sonatas are still widely performed.
The sonata mixes rhapsodic passages with brilliant runs and double stops. Fouts played it with a mixture of humility and bravura, dispatching the fast, rustic, fiddle-like passages with ease before running headlong into the work’s famously abrupt ending. “I like that piece, too,” Fouts said afterward, acknowledging the audience’s enthusiastic applause.
The program closed with George Frideric Handel’s Sonata in g, Op. 1 No. 6, one of his gems that reveal the Italian style he absorbed during his early travels.
The opening Larghetto carried a gentle melancholy, and in the final Allegro the three players locked into a lively groove, their lines interweaving with clarity and purpose.
Throughout the evening, Chatham Baroque played with the assurance of musicians who know this musical language perfectly. Written for courts, churches, and private chambers three centuries ago, the music sounded like a lively conversation — three voices exchanging vivid musical thoughts as if they had just occurred in the moment.
Published on ClevelandClassical.com March 11, 2026
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