Skip to main content

La Famille Forqueray

Jean-Baptiste Forqueray (1699-1782) was a virtuoso violist who, in 1747, published a set of compositions for viola da gamba and accompaniment, ostensibly by his late father Antoine, who had also been an esteemed virtuoso. Forqueray fils subsequently published the same pieces in arrangements for the harpsichord, and two suites of these re-arranged pieces constitute the main meat of this CD. 


The specifics of the works' attribution are altogether unclear. Jean-Baptiste took sole credit for a handful of the pieces, and for all of their 'continuo' bass lines, but, it has been argued that the majority of the music may have been his. Father and son had had a difficult relationship, to say the least, and Forqueray jr.'s motives when posthumously disseminating his father's work need not have been pure homage. Aside from that, it has been suggested that the harpsichord arrangements may have been the handiwork of Mme Marie-Rose Forqueray, Jean-Baptiste's second wife, who happened to be a harpsichordist (as his mother Henriette-Angélique had also been).

The original works were composed for the viola da gamba, a cello-sized instrument with a more-or-less baritone range, and the harpsichord arrangments are notable for maintaining that range, predominantly using the lower end of the keyboard, rather than being transposed to a higher register. The resulting music has a booming, growling darkness about it whose flavour is distinct from that of the Forquerays' contemporaries.

The present CD also includes pieces in tribute to the Forquerays by a couple of those contemporaries: François Couperin and Jacques Duphly; as well as some viol music of Antoine's arranged for the harpsichord by Justin Taylor, the performer on this disc. Taylor, pictured on the cover, looks younger than his twenty-five years (as I gather he was then), but does not want for confidence and panache in his performances. The instrument he plays has been beautifully-recorded here, and he makes it sound spectacularly good.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4.  An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...
Post a Comment
Read more

All Wrapped Up

Here's another of the compilation cassettes I bought this summer, having taken home a Denon twin-deck hi-fi cassette player from the local charity shop. All Wrapped Up is a 1983 compilation of singles by The Undertones, with Side One filled with A-sides, and B-sides on Side Two. A cassette must be the least desirable medium for such an arrangement, with a long rewind required if one just wants to hear the hits repeatedly. The Undertones were unapologetically provincial and anti-fashionable, with their songs sharply-written slices of life that pointedly avoided any mention of politics, or of the then-continuing violence in their native Derry. My favourite tracks are the obvious choices: 'Teenage Kicks', 'Jimmy Jimmy', 'Here Comes the Summer', 'My Perfect Cousin' & 'Wednesday Week'. Their later singles showed increased sophistication but lack the some of the straightforward charm of their earlier work. The B-sides, not unexpectedly, are mo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...
Post a Comment
Read more