David Pohle’s name is probably not familiar to many. Though his music appears on a handful of recorded anthologies of German 17th-century music, this, as far as I can see, is only the third release entirely devoted to him, and the previous one only appeared last year. This one makes a fairly spectacular offering in the form of his complete sonatas (29 in all) for four to eight parts, plus two short dance suites – a grand total of just over two and a half hours of music.

Born in 1624, Pohle trained under Schütz in Dresden (as good a pedigree as one could get in German music at the time) before serving at various courts, including from 1660 to 1680 in Halle, and from 1682 in Merseburg, where he died 13 years later. He also wrote a fair amount of vocal music both secular and sacred, and although not a single item of his output was published in his lifetime – and more has been lost – its presence in a decent spread of manuscript collections suggests that he was a well-respected figure across central Germany.

The sonatas are all of the one-movement but freely multi-sectional type for strings, and demonstrate a measured version of the Italian stylus phantasticus manner resembling in sound the better-known sonatas of Biber or, more precisely, Schmelzer. If they do not quite find in it the memorable fantasy of those composers, they are attractive and skilfully composed nonetheless, with a deft control of texture and flow, and more subtly varied than at first appears, even allowing themselves the odd descriptive moment, such as the Allegro all modo di battaglia in Sonata G15. The dances, on the other hand, are as foot-tappingly French as anything, gleefully aping Lully’s taut rhythms and viola-packed texture.

The performances by Clematis are exemplary. Engagingly stylish and tightly executed throughout, they create a liquid and vibrant string sound, and artfully vary the continuo colours without going over the top, sometimes adding a woody bassoon or introducing the occasional pleasing oddity such as a rasping regal or the sprung plunkings of a gut-string harpsichord. It is perhaps hard to imagine too many people feeling the need for quite as much Pohle as this in one go, but as a recorded document it couldn’t be bettered. And hey, it’s done now.