This is a Recording

Domenico Scarlatti is thought to have composed five hundred and fifty five keyboard sonatas in his time (1685-1757). None quite reach seven minutes' duration, so they're brief pieces - but there are so many. How best to approach this body of work? Some intrepid harpsichordists and pianists have recorded them all, with Scott Ross's complete set the first to be released, in 1988. Wonderful as they can be, I don't know that I'll ever want to try listening to every single one. A less serious alternative would be to try listening to them all at once . For me, the much more appealing option is to trust a performer to put together a judiciously-curated selection. As mentioned before , one of my first ever classical CD purchases was such a set, bringing together eighteen sonatas played by Andreas Staier. I'd picked the disc up having read an endorsement of Scarlatti in a poem: "It is now time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti / condensed so much music into so few ...

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...

Why do I have a bulky 12-LP box set of "Light Classical Music" occupying some of my limited shelf-space when I have no intention of listening to the music therein? Sentimental reasons explain it. Visiting my father one day he asked what music I was listening to & I replied that about half of it was classical in some form or another. He'd never acquired any taste for it, he said, whereupon a thought occurred to him and he retrieved this box from another room and handed it to me: it had been his mother's. I didn't imagine I'd end up with a keepsake of my paternal grandmother. It was surprising that anything of hers had survived some rather chaotic episodes in her house in the years following her death. Having said that, it had suffered considerable wear and tear: the box itself was broken, some of the inner sleeves were torn & stained, and one of the discs (no. 4) was in patently unplayable condition. Knowing it had been kept near a coal fire, and not fa...

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...

The budget Brilliant Classics label issued the Complete Piano Sonatas of Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812) on nine CDs between 2018 and '20. I have volumes three and four. The task was split between nine different performers, all of them playing on fortepianos, that is, on restored instruments dating from around the composer's heyday, or on modern copies made to emulate them: these having a different, more rinky-dink sound to a modern concert grand. On Volume Three, the fortepianist is Alexei Lubimov, a musician whose name I already knew well, whereas on Volume Four, Tuija Hakkila does the honours, a Finnish pianist whose name was new to me. To my mind, both musicians acquit themselves with similar distinction. The four pieces on this disc, all of them two-movment sonatas, date from several phases of Dussek's itenerant career, from 1788 when he was in pre-revolutionary Paris, to 1806-7, when he was based in Hamburg. My favorite of the four is the Op. 43 Sonata in A from 1800...

While visiting the town of Kalmar in 2001, I bought a CD entitled Alina , on the ECM label: a beautifully soporific disc including a couple of performances, extended by improvisation, of Arvo Pärt's short piano piece 'Für Alina'. Was there other piano music by Pärt out there? All I could find was another short work ('Variationen Zur Gesundung Von Arinuschka') which I obtained on a CD, ordered on-line, called Pourquoi Je Suis Si Sentimental . This disc, of 'Post-Avant-Garde Piano Music From The Ex-Soviet Union' turned out to be a real discovery - an eye-opener - my first introduction to the work of composers like Alexander Rabinovitch, Georgs Pelēcis & Valentin Silvestrov; all performed by the pianist Alexei Lubimov. Looking for more music by these composers (and for more of Lubimov's playing), led me to Der Bote , another ECM release, one with a loosely elegaic theme. The album's title (and the title of the piece by Silvestrov that closes the rec...

Johann Sch o bert (not to be confused with Franz Sch u bert) was a composer and virtuoso keyboardist active in Paris in the 1760s. He is best remembered - when remembered at all - for his remarkable & lamentable demise: "Schobert went mushroom picking with his family [...] near Paris. He tried to have a local chef prepare them, but was told they were poisonous. After unsuccessfully trying again at a restaurant at Bois de Boulogne, and being incorrectly told by a doctor acquaintance of his that the mushrooms were edible, he decided to use them to make a soup at home. Schobert, his wife, all but one of their children, and his doctor friend died." The third quarter of the 18th century was roughly the period when the newfangled "piano forte" was supplanting the harpsichord as the default keyboard instrument. As with many new technologies, a variety of piano designs proliferated early in the instrument's history, before standardisation set in. One of the var...

I only seldom visit Cardiff, but when I do, the Oxfam Books and Music shop on St. Mary's Street is somewhere I'll try to look around if time permits. They often have interesting classical LPs in stock: for instance, I picked up this album, plus a disc with Schubert's 'Death and the Maiden' quartet on it for about £6 or £7 last summer. François Couperin's Premier Livre De Piéces De Clavecin was published in 1713, comprising five 'orders' (or suites) of pieces each of which shared a common key. This disc contains the Cinquiême Ordre in its entirety, that is the fifth (and last) of the 'orders' in that first book, which is in the key of A. These are prefaced by a 'Prélude', the fifth of eight presented in Couperin's 1716 treatise L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin . This is a 1980 recording on the Astrée label, performed by Blandine Verlet on a 1716 harpsichord made in Lyon by Pierre Donzelague. Lyon was also the venue for the recording....

This CD's title refers not to the year 1700 itself, but to the settecento - the eighteenth century - in general. It brings together instrumental works by eight different composers from the various Italian nations and from different parts of that century. The composers range from the famous (Vivaldi) through the less well-known (Geminiani, Locatelli, Galuppi) to the obscure (Mascitti, Pugnani). With that period not having been a prosperous one in Italy, many of them had travelled or emigrated elsewhere in Europe, introducing a variety of un-Italian influences to their music. Rinaldo Alessandrini's Concerto Italiano here comprises seven musicians, including Alessandrini himself at the harpsichord. The disc is a sequel to a similarly-conceived album 1600 by the same group, which, alas, I haven't heard. Some of the pieces are sonatas which originally would have been intended for small groups; while others (such as Vivaldi's 'Concerto In D major: op.12 no.3') are...

Luigi Boccherini wrote in excess of a hundred string quintets, nearly a hundred string quartets, and sixty-odd string trios. Not to mention all his piano trios, piano quintets, flute quintets, guitar quintets and assorted sonatas; nor the dozen cello concertos & thirty symphonies. He wasn't shy about reusing and recycling sections of earlier works in later ones, but even so, he turned out a prodigious quantity of music, which makes its consistently high quality all the more impressive. The present disc includes four of his last string trios, written in Madrid in 1796. The default string trio line-up is violin, viola and cello, but these pieces were composed for two violins and cello, played here by the group La Real Cámera comprising Emilio Moreno and Enrico Gatti (violins) plus Wouter Möller (cello). Moreno is also responsible for the booklet notes in which he characterises trios written for this instrumentation as "a difficult, arid and obsolete form ... a remnant of the...

Another week, another album valled Vertigo . This one combines selections of 18th-century pieces for harpsichord composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Pancrace Royer, and performed by Jean Rondeau. It's one of several CDs of harpsichord works I bought in 2019 having resolved to expand my hitherto very limited knowledge of 'Baroque' music a little.   It's a wonderful album, with spirited playing and vivid recorded sound. Rondeau was apprently only twenty-two at the time of the recording , with his beard yet to attain its subsequent grandeur . I enjoy it all, with the dramatic title track and 'La Marche des Scythes' (both by Royer) among the highlights. Rondeau contributes a lyrical essay to the CD booklet, outlining his rationale for selecting and ordering the various pieces as he did. There's also a short piece by Philippe Charles about the renowned antique instrument used, and about the Château d'Assas, the venue for the recording. As is commonplace on...

Johann Sebastian Bach is widely revered as the best of all composers, and is frequently praised in the most extravagant terms. His second Partita for solo violin, and, in particular, the long 'Chaconne' which closes it, has further been singled out as one of his profoundest creations. In the unlikely event of this blog attracting any readers (even the bots have moved on elsewhere, it seems), they will find further confirmation here - if any were needed - that my taste is defective and not to be trusted: I don't much care for J.S. Bach's music. The BWV 1004 'Chaconne' is a partial exception to that rule: I have found it absorbing and impressive on the occasions I've listened to it, but those occasions have been few. I bought this 10" disc of a mid-'50s mono recording of it by Viennese fiddler Wolfgang Schneiderhan nearly twenty years ago, but have only seldom blown the dust off it. Other Bach pieces I don't mind include his Concerto for Two Violi...

Only within the last five years have I begun to appreciate the delights of Haydn's music, and even now I know very little of it beyond his later string quartets. It had formerly struck me as ungraspably remote music, but after acquiring, and properly listening to, a couple of '60s quartet recordings on vinyl, its finer qualities belatedly started to sink in. With a few quartets obtained piecemeal in that way from nearby charity shops, I thought it would be good to get a larger set of them on CD, and, to that end, bought the Op 71, 74 & 76 quartets in early '90s performances by the Kodály Quartet on four discs for a few pounds via ebay. I was perfectly happy with those excellent recordings except, with each disc being in its own separate jewel case, they took up what I felt was a disproportionate expanse of my limited shelf-space. When I read the praise of the recent recordings by the London Haydn Quartet on the Hyperion label, with the same pieces available as two doubl...

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, wh...