Joseph Gibbs (1698-1788)
Eight Sonatas for Violin and Basso Continuo, Op.1 (c.1746)
The Brook Street Band
rec. 2025, The Great Barn, Oxnead Hall, UK
First Hand Records FHR188 [83]
The exact details of Joseph Gibbs’ musical education are shadowy but the Colchester-born musician possibly studied in London with Thomas Roseingrave before returning to East Anglia, where he lived for the rest of his life. He was successively organist in Harwich, Dedham and, finally, Ipswich, where he was to die in 1788. He was clearly involved in local music-making activities but seems only to have produced two volumes – this Op.1 set published in c.1746 and a set of Quartets, Op.2 three decades later in 1777.
A Gainsborough portrait of Gibbs exists, painted around 1755 – it’s reproduced in the inside fold-out of this disc – and shows him sitting modestly in front of leather-bound copies of music by Corelli and Geminiani and, in a piece of canny detective work deduced by the violinist Rachel Harris, the more obscure figure of Christian Festing. This gives a strong clue as to the stylistic affiliations of Gibbs’ sonatas which cleave to the Corellian Sonata da camera models and show his influence as well as those of Geminiani and Handel.
He favoured standard four-movement structures and only one sonata is in three movements. He was also immersed in chromatic writing and had a penchant for variation form. To some extent, therefore, he looked back to Corelli, Veracini and Handel’s violin works – Gibbs had transcribed one of Handel’s Violin Sonatas and knew his music well – as well as forward to gallant elements that were soon to become pervasive. The sonatas, in fact, offer a painterly palette of influence that prove most attractive.
The finale of Sonata No.1 in D minor shows this element of graciousness and charm whilst No.2 ends with a winsome and rather old-fashioned Minuet. The second movement Allegro of No.3 in G major reveals the dual influences of Corelli and especially Handel whereas its lilting finale points to airier and more decorous influences. The slow movement of No.4 is most sympathetically phrased in this performance and shows another element in the Gibbs arsenal, a propensity for the Scotch Snap, something that was in the air stylistically, of course, and that Gibbs shared with, say, James Hook amongst his contemporaries. Probably the most commanding of the eight sonatas is the Fifth in E major, from its echt-Handelian slow introduction, through a finely contrasted fast Vivace, thence to a short but deeply affecting Saraband and finally to the Gigue finale, Rachel Harris’s violin springing deftly over Tatty Theo’s cello pizzicato, underpinned by Carolyn Gibley’s harpsichord.
The opening movement of the Seventh Sonata – the sole three-movement work – is unusually long in the context of the sonatas as a whole, at nearly four-and-a-half-minutes, but is nicely textured, its succeeding Allegro buoyant. The Grave opening of the final sonata, in E flat major, is suitably stately, and is followed by a suave Siciliana, a splendid Fugue and ending with lively, ripe fanfare figures in the concluding Corno finale.
The three members of The Brook Street Band perform with admirable engagement and subtlety here – robust where necessary, deft elsewhere – and have been most attractively recorded. I greatly enjoyed their survey of these sonatas which have never been previously recorded so far as I’m aware. They perform on instruments of the period or, in Gibley’s case, a 2003 instrument after Pierre Donzelague, Lyon, 1711 which was made, appropriately, by Alan Gotto in Norwich. This venturesome disc expands our appreciation of English instrumental music of the period in high style.
Jonathan Woolf
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