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...

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...

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....

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...

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...