The elegant trio sonata texture, in which two higher instruments are grounded by a continuo bass, link all the works on this program of music by three Baroque giants: George Frideric Handel, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Dieterich Buxtehude. Even the rarely heard set of nine German arias of Handel—his last music in German—are essentially miniature trio sonatas that use the soprano as another high instrument with the violin. Though they were written at the same time as some of his greatest operas—and even borrow materials from them—they are perhaps the most instrumentally conceived of all Handel’s vocal works.

Bach and the earlier Buxtehude are well paired, for Bach deeply admired Buxtehude’s music and made a pilgrimage as a young man to meet him in Lübeck. In Bach’s Sonata sopr’il Soggetto Reale and the two Buxtehude sonatas written a half century earlier, listeners can hear how both composers treated this genre as an opportunity for contrapuntal mastery mixed with playfulness.