“It is difficult to imagine a better recording of these pieces” (American Record Guide). Having been born half a century after Heinrich Schütz, the ‘father of German musicians’, and a little less than half a century before J. S. Bach, Dietrich Buxtehude was a living link between the founder of Protestant Baroque music and its greatest master. In his Seven Sonatas, Op. 1 he reveals a fertile imagination capable of expressing lyrically delicate, sorrowful, and dramatic emotions. He creates a world of sound that for variety of expression and constant alternation between the fantastic and contrapuntal styles has no equal in the instrumental music of the seventeenth century.