Tag: Keyboard music

Francesco Corti harpsichord
79:14
arcana A480
+Böhm, Couperin, Hasse, Kuhnau, Telemann

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This is a recital that introduces us to the idea of formation by learning under a teacher’s instruction – and also by copying out the music – pieces of that teacher’s choosing.  The “Little Books” of the title – Klavierbüchlein in German – are the books prepared by Johann Sebastian for his eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann in 1720 and his second wife, Anna Magdalena in 1722 and 1725.

In these latter, we find the first sketches for what would later become the French Suites, while others come from the ‘Andreas Bach Book’ that originated with Johann Sebastian’s eldest brother and first teacher, Johann Christoph. Here we have some of Bach’s earliest keyboard compositions set alongside those he admired and copied for teaching purposes by other composers.

Francesco Corti, an experienced teacher as well as harpsichordist, plays a selection of these in his illuminating recital on a 1998 copy by Andrea Restelli of a Christian Vater harpsichord (Hannover 1738) now in the Germanisches Museum, Nürnberg. The introductory essay on music from the Bach family circle by Peter Wollny and Corti’s own piece, Copying the master’s gestures, are both in English, German and French, and each exudes thoughtful, undogmatic scholarship and sound musicianship.

Corti’s playing matches these aspirations. He is fluent without being showy and varies his style with the chosen music – indeed the whole production is an essay in how to teach by immersion in sources, sounds and sensual serendipity. Recorded in 2019 before the pandemic of this past year, this is the kind of production that is useful to have in lockdown as a teaching aid or refresher course, helping students re-examine the sources of their own technique and choices.

I recommend it for these reasons as well as for the innate musicality of Conti’s playing, which can be glimpsed live in his performance of the A major harpsichord concerto BWV 1055.

Here you can see Corti engaging with the other players in the only one of Bach’s early concertos that he transcribed for harpsichord – probably originally for oboe d’amore – to have a separate continuo part in addition to the solo instrument. This is teaching by immersion, and I commend Conti as a first-class teacher, as he is on this clip, teaching his master’s Suite in G major.

David Stancliffe

Asako Ogawa harpsichord
150:31 (2 CDs in a card tryptych)
First Hand Records FHR92

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Asako Ogawa, an accomplished harpsichordist and accompanist, is based in the Guildhall, where her harpsichord teachers included Nicholas Parle (who produced this recording), James Johnstone and Laurence Cummings, with Steven Devine for fortepiano. As you may imagine with this pedigree, she plays elegantly on a harpsichord by Alan Gotto, 2009, after Jean Goermans/Pascal Taskin, 1764/1783, and writes her own intelligent liner notes on the Partitas and their place in Bach’s output. She recorded them in the Church of the Ascension, Plumstead this summer, so her calling card has been produced in time for pre-Christmas publicity.

I found her lyrical playing engaging from the start: the imitative writing in the opening Praeludium in the B-flat Partita is limpid and elegant on the upper 8’ and in this as in so many other movements you can sense the implied counterpoint. Her ornaments in the repeats are stylish and the choice of registration seems apt. It is certainly varied, and the contrast between the buff stop on the main 8’ she uses for the Minuet I in this Partita and the slightly thinner 8’ on the upper manual for Minuet II is telling. But it brings into stark relief an irritation that I find detracts from the admirable playing. That is the distinctly audible hard metallic chip on the d above middle C on the lower 8’ register, which is the major third in the opening this very key. Whether it might have been a particular trait of the acoustic or could have been solved by re-voicing that one note, I do not know. In general, I like a little individual character in the voicing of ranks (on organs as well as harpsichords), but this is obtrusive. No details are given about the temperament and tuning.

I looked for more details of Alan Gotto’s harpsichords on his website which has sound samples, and in many ways, the Goermans/Taskin double that Ogawa plays seems a good choice for this recording with a good French-style bloom in the middle register. The instrument sampled there certainly doesn’t have a wolf-note on that d, so this must be a peculiarity of that particular instrument, as can happen. In the very French Ouverture of the D major Partita (I.13), the merry clang of the full registration in the opening section certainly masks it and the fugato starts on the upper manual.

For her rhythmic control, listen to the elegant and only slightly inégale Courante in the 2^nd Partita, and for contrapuntal clarity the Capriccio at the end of that suite. This is a capable and sensitive player who is intelligently inside the music, and quite capable of drawing us into it. I admire her playing and hope that it shines through the instrument’s infelicity to give her reputation the laurels her playing deserves.

David Stancliffe

Steven Devine harpsichord
148:45 (2 CDs in a single jewel case)
resonus RES10261

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As in Volume 1 that I reviewed for the EMR in July 2019, Steven Devine records Volume 2 of Das Wohltemperierte Klavier on Colin Booth’s 2000 harpsichord after a Johann Christoff Fleischer original (Hamburg 1710) that he tunes in a version of Kirkberger III, ‘gently modified so as to retain the key colours that make the harpsichord sing so much better, but eliminating any extreme dissonances’.

I have been waiting impatiently for Volume 2 to appear, as Das Wohltemperierte Klavier is for me a perfect accompaniment to the periods of lock-down we have experienced. Playing one of these highly individual and characterful pieces each day is a way of articulating the passage of time in a way that helps give shape and direction to life when other bearings fail. I said in reviewing the first volume that Devine’s ‘has a particular seemingly effortless grace, and it’s the one of all I’ve heard in the past ten years that I am happiest to live with.’ Volume 2 confirms this judgement, and the ‘effortless grace‘ – which of course is the result of much hard work and study, and is the very opposite to those recordings which make you sit up and take notice of the player’s ability (rather than the composer’s) – is just what I hope readers will want of a recording that they are going to live with. Clever and ‘original’ performances are fine in a concert hall where they can make us sit up and rethink our opinions. But that kind of attention-seeking playing time after time is wearisome. We need to remember that although Bach was a consummate composer, he was revered in his lifetime as a keyboard player, and with that went a lifetime’s experience as a teacher setting goals that would stretch his pupils’ capabilities as well as their imaginations. Stellar performances like this one come I suspect from those who are born teachers too: Devine’s pupils are hugely lucky.

Colin Booth’s harpsichord is never aggressive and I am hardly aware of the chosen registration, as it all seems so naturally right. Without knowing the original on which it is based, all I can say is that this instrument combines clarity with a degree of mellowness that makes the lines sing and gives a distinct aura, like the sympathetic strings of a Viola d’Amore. Prelude 18 in G# minor (CD 2, track 11) illustrates the registrational possibilities well – they are gentle and unobtrusive and don’t clamour for attention – and the listener looking to understand Devine’s subtle approach to rhythmic articulation should listen to the swinging inégales of the Prelude in D (CD 1, track 9) or to the Fugue in D minor (CD 1, track 12). His ornaments and passagework are equally unmechanical and have that degree of fluidity that shows how well he is in command of the music.

The distinctive tuning that results from Devine’s tweaking of Kirkberger III never makes me wince, but results in the sharp keys maintaining a pronounced distinction from the flat keys and while we shall never know with absolute certainty just how Johann Sebastian tuned his keyboards, this version certainly produces a distinctive sound in each key, one of the chief lacks in performances on pianos tuned in modern equal temperament. This time, Devine’s essay ponders the range of possibilities behind this second collection and its context, reflecting some of the more modern or Galant-leaning characteristics that herald the later classical Sonata form.

In spite of being recorded quite closely, the acoustics of St Mary’s Church, Birdsall in North Yorkshire create a wonderful aura of tonality for each piece – just listen to the harmonics hanging in the air between the end of the Prelude and the beginning of the Fugue in G (CD2, tracks 5-6). This is – and remains with the publication of Part 2 – my top choice for the 48.

David Stancliffe

Paolo Zanzu harpsichord
130:40 (2 CDs)
Musica Ficta MF8032/3

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This recording of the English Suites by Paolo Zanzu, the young Italian/French harpsichordist, appears to be his debut solo Bach recording. A well-known and trusted collaborator in music projects of a wide variety, Zanzu teaches at the Brussels Conservatoire, and is the founder of Le Stagioni. He posts an impressive list of the people and groups with whom he has played and to whom he has acted as assistant director, including Bill Christie’s Les Arts Florissants, John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi 450 project and the English Baroque Soloists, in the very brief liner notes in French, English and Italian.

He plays with a mature rhythmic flexibility, and I found myself warming to him the more I listened. As you might expect, his playing is not just note-perfect but carefully prepared, and the instrument is well-suited to the complex English Suites. It was built after a historic instrument of c. 1730 from the school of Gottfried Silbermann by Anthony Sidey and Frédéric Bal of Paris in 1995, with 8’ & 4’ on manual 1, and 8’ with harp and lute stops on manual 2. It is tuned at A=405hz in a Silbermann temperament.

The registration possibilities of the instrument are very distinctive. The upper manual’s 8’ is pretty uncompromising in tone, and when used with the lute (and harp?) stop in the 2^nd Bourrée of the First Suite, for example, is not only extremely rustic but bordering on the unpleasant. It reminds me of the coarseness of some rustic dances in the Brueghel mode!

This is presumably intended, as the rest of the Suites swing along with that fluency and attention to the patterning of threes and fours in the groups of quavers and semi-quavers that reveal how well aware he is of the very complex interplay of rhythmic nuance that is so characteristic of Bach. This maturity only comes to a secure, established and confident player who is at ease with himself as well as with the Bach. This is an enormously musical performance of a complex work which is not as frequently recorded as it might be.

I would urge those who do not have an up-to-the-moment recording of the English Suites on a characterful instrument to consider this one, played by a real musician who knows how to stroke life out of an instrument rather than batter it into submission.

David Stancliffe

Carole Cerasi with James Johnstone harpsichord & Reiko Ichise gamba
Metronome METCD 1100 (10 CDs in a box)

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To record and release the whole of Couperin’s seminal Harpsichord oeuvre is an astonishing act of faith and dedication. The lock-down times give amateurs (in the French sense) the chance to get to grips with and reappraise this amazing corpus of music which more than any that I know gives us a feel for what makes French music of the late seventeenth century so very distinctive.

Apart from L’Art de Toucher le Clavecin (1716), Couperin’s pieces are arranged in twenty-seven Ordres, each grounded in a particular key, but avoiding the tight structure of the Bach suites, where the formal series of dances provide a recognised structure. With Couperin we are in a looser, more wayward structure of movements with a more programmatic feel: the fascinating titles given to some pieces reveal the background in a theatrical imagination where reality is miniaturised, life-changing experiences immortalised in particularity and the trivial glimpse turned into an epigrammatic memorial. While Les Langeurs-Tendres in the Sixième Ordre is a classic bit of descriptive mood music, no-one really knows to what Les Baricades Mistérieuses refers. La Triomphante that opens the Dixième Ordre could not rattle the sabres more, while Le Petit-Rien is just what it says – a few insouciant bars of delight, ending the Quatorzième Ordre, with its birdsong pieces and the softly jangling bell-like notes of Le Carillon de Cythère.

Some of the most evocative pieces are written in the resonant tenor range which is so characteristic of Couperin’s style, like Les Ondes that concludes the Cinquième Ordre. But what makes or mars any recording of Couperin’s music are two factors: first, the player’s familiarity with the keyboard style of the period, where ornaments and their languid execution as well as the conventions of notation are so important for whether the playing feels French and second, the choice of instrument(s). For those who would like to sample Cerasi’s skills and sensibilities, I suggest they turn to CD 9.7-11, where they will hear not only Le Point du jour, L’Anguille and the Menuets Croisès but also her skill and immaculate sense of timing in the halting, sliding Le Croc-en-jambe and the magician’s sleight of hand in Les Tours de Passe-passe. I was brought up on Kenneth Gilbert’s recordings of Couperin, made in the 1970s, and it is largely his editions of the Ordres that I still use. But Cerasi’s playing has a grace, a flexibility and a subtle freedom, devoid of tiresome and faddish mannerisms, that I admire greatly. Cerasi is ably partnered in those pieces requiring two clavecins by her producer in this outstanding enterprise, James Johnstone.

For the instruments, she chooses a series of harpsichords, beginning with the Ruckers of 1636 that underwent a makeover by Henri Hemsch of Paris in 1763 in the Cobbe Collection at Hatchlands and ending with a splendid Antoine Vater of 1738 that seems to live in a private house in Ireland – now there’s a ray of hope in a dark world! The instruments – including the modern ones by Philippe Humeau (1989) after Vater 1738 and Keith Hill (2010) after a Taskin of 1769 – are all suitably French sounding and are all pitched at 415. I haven’t wearied of the wonderful sounds she coaxes from each harpsichord – so different in the languorous slow movements and so bright and fiery at times in the rondeaux, even after listening to the 10 CDs several times, and I don’t think they could be bettered: they certainly sing out better than those used by Kenneth Gilbert in the 1970s. Each instrument is illustrated in the accompanying notes, although ideally I would have liked more information on a website if not in the booklet, particularly on the 1738 Vater from Ireland, which sounds quite wonderful. Nor is there information on the temperament used: the keys are delightfully differentiated – the Eb and C minor are particularly dark and velvety, so my guess is that it is a sixth or fifth comma meantone system. But I trust Cerasi’s scholarship and research to know what was likely in Paris in the first quarter of the 18th century.

The main content of the booklet is an excellent essay, 21 columns long, by Nicholas Anderson, in both English and French. It manages to set Couperin’s oeuvre in its historical, visual and theatrical context, alert us to some of the more recent scholarship and writing and give us a feel for the distinctive nature of each Ordre – no mean achievement in this highly condensed format.

Each CD has a card sleeve with the content and timings of each piece listed on the back, and I am amazed and delighted in equal measure that it has been possible to issue the whole of this project for under £45.00. I don’t expect ever to hear a more thoughtful and intense yet playful and elegant version of Couperin’s great works, and Carole Cerasi has us all in her debt. Buy it at once, even if you’ve never heard more than a handful of these works before. This is all pure gold, and I know no better introduction to the French style than this.

David Stancliffe