15 Fantasias for viols, D.732-747

These fantasias were written for a "consort" of viols, bowed string instruments similar to violins and cellos but held differently and fretted like a guitar, playing together without a conductor. There is no single storyline across all fifteen; each fantasia is its own short essay in imitation, where one instrument states a musical idea and the others answer it in turn, overlapping and layering until the texture thickens into a dense weave of independent lines. Listen for the way a single short phrase, sometimes only a handful of notes, gets passed from voice to voice, inverted upside down, or stretched out slower while another line keeps moving quickly above or below it. Many of the fantasias shift abruptly between sections of different character within just a few minutes, moving from slow, close harmonies that lean into dissonance and resolve, into faster, more agitated dance-like passages, and back again. Because a concert typically presents a selection rather than all fifteen, expect a sequence of short, self-contained pieces, each lasting only a few minutes, rather than one continuous large-scale work. The pleasure is in the close listening: following a single line as it threads through the other parts, and noticing how briefly dissonant clashes are always resolved into consonance a moment later.