This is a Recording

At the age of five (ca. 1670), Élisabeth Jacquet, the daughter of an organist and music teacher, and something of a prodigy, was presented to King Louis XIV for whom she played the harpsichord and sang. She evidently made a favourable impression, as she was thereafter granted Royal patronage, and was in the privileged position of being able to dedicate her first published works, a collection of four suites for harpsichord issued in 1687, to the King. By that time she had married, taking the step (unusual in France at the time) of appending her husband's surname to her maiden name. Three of those four suites make up the bulk of this CD. Each suite brings together pieces sharing a common key, beginning with an "unmeasured" prelude, that is, one written without bar lines, with the player at liberty to set their own tempo. The subsequent pieces in each suite are all based on a set sequence of dances deemed proper at the time, beginning with an 'Allemande' and ending w...

One of the first few classical CDs I took a shine to, back in the mid-to-late '90s, was a disc of Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas performed on harpsichord by Andreas Staier. For twenty years it was just about the only recording of baroque music I owned. Not long after turning fifty, it occurred to me to seek out some more compositions for harpsichord. Staier's name being one I knew, I looked up his other recordings, of which this one in particular caught my eye: ...pour passer la mélancolie , a 2013 release on the Harmonia Mundi label. It's an excellent recital, bringing together works by six different French and German composers dating from between the mid-17th century and the first decade of the 18th. It's loosely-themed around notions of melancholy: there are laments and tombeaux in commemoration of the departed, along with sombre passacaglias and other plaintive pieces. The disc's title comes from an opus by Johann Jacob Froberger supposedly written i...