Stimulated by the sheer pleasure of playing Buxtehude’s extraordinary chamber music, Le Concert Brisé and William Dongois have taken the liberty of selecting some of his sonatas for violin, viol and continuo and adapting them for cornett, sackbut and concertante organ.

Not only do certain passages prove to be entirely natural for wind instruments but violinists complain about the awkward nature of these sonatas, whose idiom is at least as typical of the keyboard as of the string family. These are not intended to be a ‘musicologically correct’ version of the sonatas; rather a plausible view of what could well have been the practice of the time.