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Froberger: Suites for Harpsichord (vol. 3)

Gilbert Rowland
120: 17 (2 CDs)
Athene ath 23213

This collection of twelve suites for harpsichord represents around a third of the suites he wrote, which in turn are a small part of his oeuvre for keyboard. In a comprehensive programme note, the harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland makes a strong case for Froberger as ‘one of the most important and highly original composers of the seventeenth century’. Listening to this concluding third volume in a complete account of the composer’s suites, I am inclined to agree with him. Born in Stuttgart to a musical family, Froberger soon found his way to Vienna where he was court organist to Ferdinand III, who paid for him to imbibe the very latest keyboard trends from Frescobaldi in Rome. Later in life, he was drawn to the glittering Paris of Louis XIV and the company of Duchess Sybilla of Württemberg, a talented pupil and evidently a close friend in whose company he eventually died. It is easy to hear the influence of Frescobaldi in this music but there is a solid Germanic core to it which recalls the music of much later keyboard composers such as Handel. It would be fascinating to hear the choral music by Froberger which has recently re-surfaced, which may have been written for the Viennese Hofkapelle, but clearly the keyboard lay at the heart of his profession and also his surviving work. Rowland plays an impressive 2-manual French-style harpsichord by Andrew Wooderson after a 1750 original by Goermans of Paris, maybe an instrument with a slightly fuller sound than Froberger would have been familiar with almost a century earlier. It does sound magnificent though, and Rowland makes intelligent use of its available timbres, playing with complete technical assurance and innate musicality – and more than that: His intimate understanding of Froberger’s idiom gives his playing an authority which makes his bold claims utterly convincing.

D. James Ross

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