Fernando Habegger

Suites, fugues, toccatas and variations by a well-travelled contemporary of JS Bach, in a new recording by an Italian harpsichordist with an impressive catalogue of Baroque rarities on Brilliant Classics.

Even in scholarly explorations of French-Baroque harpsichord repertoire, the name of Jean-Jacques Beauvarlet-Charpentier (1734-1794) is mentioned only in passing. Previous albums of his music have been dedicated to his organ output; this new album will attract any collectors of French Baroque music, who will be rewarded by memorable and colourful portrait pieces every bit as vivid as the likes of d’Anglebert and Couperin.

Gottfried Grünewald was a successful opera singer in 18th-century Germany, based at the theatre in Hamburg for many years, but a familiar figure in German courts and theatres across Germany. When he died in 1739, the composer Christopher Graupner (his colleague in Darmstadt) destroyed most of Grünewald's music, according to an agreement they had apparently made. Only seven keyboard partitas are known to have survived to modern times, and they receive their first complete recording here in the spirited hands of Fernando de Luca, who has done so much to rescue forgotten names from obscurity with his albums for Brilliant Classics.

Gottfried Grünewald was a successful opera singer in 18th-century Germany, based at the theatre in Hamburg for many years, but a familiar figure in German courts and theatres across Germany. When he died in 1739, the composer Christopher Graupner (his colleague in Darmstadt) destroyed most of Grünewald's music, according to an agreement they had apparently made. Only seven keyboard partitas are known to have survived to modern times, and they receive their first complete recording here in the spirited hands of Fernando de Luca, who has done so much to rescue forgotten names from obscurity with his albums for Brilliant Classics.

The pinnacle of Renaissance music and its practice was forged in an incessant coming and going, a constant journey of musicians and musical chapels through courts or noble, royal, ducal, and papal houses throughout Europe. From the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, musicians from far and wide gathered in Flanders to catch up on musical material, sent by kings, dukes and counts from all over Europe. Some musicians called these gatherings “the schools.” These meetings served, in addition to learning things about their Art, as a kind of market for musicians. Musicians from the Franco-Flemish regions brought their polyphonic compositions and most refined musical skills to other countries like Italy or Spain.

An obscure corner of the French Baroque illuminated: the only available recording of the sole extant collection by a Parisian organist and composer.About Pierre-Thomas Dufour, almost nothing is now known for certain beyond his death in Paris, on 30 December 1786, and the publication in 1770 of this collection of harpsichord pieces bearing his name. He probably wrote a good deal else, both for harpsichord and organ, given that the title page of the collection informs us that Dufour was organist of the Eglise de Saint-Jean-en-Grève and the Eglise Saint-Laurent, both in Paris.

First recordings of the complete surviving keyboard works by a forgotten figure of the French Baroque.Brilliant Classics has revived the names of many composers from obscure corners of history. Few of them have been as buried by the past as Pierre-Claude Foucquet, who was active in Paris in the first half of the 18th century. Yet anyone listening to this first complete recording of his music for harpsichord will surely wonder why. Three volumes survive: two books of Pièces de Clavecin, and a third entitled Caractères de la Paix. This was the first to be published in 1749. By then Foucquet had been organist at the magnificent Church of Saint-Eustache for some years, and he would go on to take up the post of titulaire at Notre Dame. He was following in a distinguished family line, his father and grandfather both having been organists at Saint-Eustache.

Suites, fugues, toccatas and variations by a well-travelled contemporary of JS Bach, in a new recording by an Italian harpsichordist with an impressive catalogue of Baroque rarities on Brilliant Classics.The music of Conrad Friedrich Hurlebusch (1691-1765) has featured on a few enterprising collections of Baroque-era rarities, but this is the first-ever album to be entirely dedicated to the art of a composer whose style successfully mirrors his cosmopolitan outlook. Having received initial tuition from both his father Heinrich – another organist/composer – and from a pupil of Buxtehude, Hurlebusch left his birthplace of Braunschweig and embarked on a journey around Europe that, for the first half of his career, took him to Hambiurg, Tuscany, Venice, Stockholm and many points in between. On a stay in Leipzig, he met Bach and his sons; CPE mentioned Hurlebusch in dispatches as an excellent keyboard virtuoso.