Samuel Pepys (1633 - 1703) pondered the difference between dreaming and waking in his personal diary, which the Secretary of State of the Royal Navy and passionate amateur musician kept during the years 1660 -1669. He played the lute and noted 1668, that he had begun to learn the recorder. This disc is a collection of musical treasures between dream immersion and joie de vivre from the multinational melting pot of baroque London.

Born in Grottkau, a town close to Wroclaw in Lower Silesia (modern day Poland), Sylvius Leopold Weiss (1687-1750) is for the lute what Johann Sebastian Bach represents for harpsichord and organ. Since 1706, in his hometown, he served Count of Palatinate Charles Philippe, brother of Prince Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, patron of the arts and dedicatee of Arcangelo Corelli’s Concerti Grossi, Op VI.

Starting in 1718, he settled permanently in Dresden, refusing the salary offered by the Viennese Court –which was almost twice as much as he was earning in Dresden – and dedicated his efforts to composing more than 600 lute pieces, either solo or with other instruments. In Dresden, he took part in the musical life in court and met numerous musicians; he was particularly friendly with Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s son and organist at Saint Sophia’s Church. In 1739, the two friends travelled to Leipzig where they were hosted by Johann Sebastian for four weeks. We don’t know for sure for the music played by Bach and Weiss during their meeting, but it seems legitimate to think that they played their music on their instruments composing, arringing or improvising together. This programme is meant to witness this precise type of practise, and in some manner aims at recreating the musical atmosphere of these two musicians’ meeting, during which, as reported by Johann Friedrich Reichardt in the Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung,"being aware of the difficulty in performing controlled and elegant phrases on the lute, eyewitnesses ensure that the great lutenist from Dresden, together with the great organist and harpsichordist Bach improvised many fugues and fantasies together".

Sylvius Leopold Weiss was born in the then Bohemian province of Silesia (now in Poland) in 1687 and grew up under the strong influence of Losy, which can be seen clearly in his early compositions. After his Italian sojourn (1710-14), Weiss became deeply involved with the Prague musical milieu and, according to numerous documents, he must have spent much time there even after he was invited by Augustus the Strong, on the 23rd of August 1718, to become an "Electoral Saxon and Royal Polish Chamber Musician" at his court in Dresden. In the years between 1717 and 1724 he worked closely with Johann Christian Anthoni von Adlersfeld at the Prague Music Academy to create one of most extensive collections of his music ever assembled, what we now know as the "London Manuscript." Also, in this period he worked with the Prague lute maker Thomas Edlinger to improve upon the 11-course instrument normally used by adding two bass courses to extend its range. Two different solutions were possible: using thicker or slightly longer strings. The thicker strings didn’t sound very good, so the extra length was decided upon. The added bass courses were placed on a newfangled contraption attached to the side of the pegbox, called a "bass-rider." This is the kind of lute I play for this recording. By the way, lutes were strung in gut and not in metal, as they often are today, and I have continued this tradition for the present recording. The Dresden manuscript includes many of Weiss’s best-known works that are found in other manuscripts as well, but it also contains a number of expansive sonatas composed late in life that are unique to this source. A few of them are in Weiss’s own hand, but the rest were probably copied by the Saxon minister for war, Friedrich Wilhelm Raschke, who, according to Crawford, "seems to have gained access to what must have been Weiss’s personal archive of music."