Sophie Yates

There is no surviving autograph manuscript of Bach’s ‘English’ Suites, and for such a set of magnificent pieces, an important and well-loved part of the baroque keyboard ‘canon’, surprisingly little is known about its history. What we do know is that the suites are amongst Bach’s earlier works – probably written in the second decade of the eighteenth century – and that the appellation ‘English’ was not given to them until the 1750s. In order to understand these fascinating works on a deeper level, we have to appreciate the importance of dance in the cultural context of eighteenth-century Europe. As a social skill, the ability to dance correctly was considered so vital that every court had a Dancing Master, often French, who taught the different types of dances to aspiring courtiers.

Johann Christian Bach's sonatas belong so much to the domain of the fortepianist that we forget how terrific they can sound on the harpsichord; they are by turns rhythmically engaging, almost jazzy, witty, sparkling, and expressive. By most accounts Bach played both instruments with equal facility and did not leave us a stated preference for one over the other, indeed if he had one. Sophie Yates has done very well to remind us with her superb Chandos recording Johann Christian Bach: Six Sonatas, Op. 5, that the London Bach need not be heard on fortepiano to be experienced to his best advantage; one may make the case that Bach's sonatas benefit to some extent from the brightness of the older instrument. Yates is the first artist to record Bach's Op. 5 as a set on the harpsichord; the only other complete recording of Op. 5 has been done on fortepiano, yet these sonatas are most commonly heard individually or mixed up with the later, "Welcker" Sonatas, Op. 17. Although they are difficult to individually date, Bach's Op. 5 was published in 1766 and all six are thought to date from his first four years in London; in her notes, Yates correctly observes the impact of Thomas Arne on Bach's style and of the general English approach to melody. Luckily in Bach's case the Italian manner had already held sway for some time by his arrival in London in 1762, so the learning curve was not a tough road to hoe for the Padre Martini-educated master.

The New Grove Dictionary has entries on 10 musically active members of the Couperin dynasty, of whom Armand-Louis is, chronologically speaking, the eighth. Born in 1725, he was the son of one of the great François Couperin’s cousins, and held a number of organ posts in Paris, including the virtually family-owned one of St Gervais, on the way to Vespers at which he was killed in a road accident just a few months before the Revolution. According to accounts he was a likeable man whose life was led free from strife and uncorrupted by ambition, and it is not fanciful to say that such are the qualities which inform his harpsichord music. Mostly rather rangy character pieces, though with a sprinkling of dances, they show the bold textural richness of the later French harpsichordist-composers, if without the galloping imagination of figures such as Rameau, Balbastre or Royer. Instead, they prefer to inhabit a contented rococo world, into which they bring considerable professional polish. If that makes the pieces sound predominantly ‘pleasant’, well, so they are… as agreeable a body of solo harpsichord music as any. But they are not vapid and neither are they easy, and we can be grateful that this selection has fallen to a player as technically assured and as musically sympathetic as Sophie Yates.

This collection of 18th century harpsichord music brings together works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Jacques Duphly, Francois Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, George Frederic Handel, Louis-Claude Daquin, and Guiseppe Domenico Scarlatti. The pieces go together nicely, not least because of the way in which Sophie Yates plays them.

Collections of Baroque keyboard music are often focused on famous French and German composers, so there's comparatively little available on CD of English harpsichord music of the 18th century, aside from recordings of works by Henry Purcell and George Frederick Handel. Considering the rarity of its material, Sophie Yates' 2016 album on Chaconne, The Pleasures of the Imagination, holds a certain appeal because its selections haven't been dulled by excessive anthologizing. While some of the composers' names may ring a bell, such as John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Thomas Arne, and Johann Christian Bach (the "London Bach"), their contributions here will be unknown to most listeners, while William Croft, Maurice Greene, and Richard Jones are known only to specialists in the period.

Yates’s guileless approach really captures the music’s ingenuousness, even if she occasionally sounds a little too strait-laced. Her harpsichord (a copy by Andrew Garlich of an instrument made in 1681 by Jean-Antoine Vaudry, now in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum) could hardly be better suited to the music, with its sweet, warm sound, beautifully reproduced by the Chandos engineers, who don’t make the all too frequent mistake of recording the instrument too close.

The Spanish and Portuguese influence in Domenico Scarlatti’s rhythms and, perhaps to a lesser extent, melodies are distinctive features of his keyboard style. Sophie Yates has chosen these evocative gestures in Scarlatti’s sonatas as determining characteristics of her recital Fandango – Scarlatti in Iberia. In fact, only four of the 13 items in her programme are by Scarlatti himself, the remaining pieces being by José Larrañaga, Seixas, Sebastian Albero y Añaños, and Soler, whose colourful ‘Fandango’ concludes her disc. Readers who know their Scarlatti will not need to be reminded either of the bold originality or of the wonderful variety of colours and sentiments present in his harpsichord sonatas.

Sophie Yates’s 1993 debut CD offered a fine selection of French Baroque harpsichord music. For this second disc she has turned her attention south to Spain and Portugal and back to the 16th as well as 17th century. The repertoire, though less familiar, is certainly attractive – delightful examples of tiento and diferencias by Cabezón; Coelho’s compelling Segunda Susana; the ornate traceries of Ximénez and Cabanilles. And all played with a graceful eloquence that is quietly impressive.

Sophie Yates began her career by winning the international Erwin Bodky Competition at the Boston Early Music Festival, and as a result she was invited to tour and broadcast throughout the eastern states of America. She now performs regularly around Europe, the United States and Japan, and has also worked in Syria, Morocco and Western Australia. Known for her affinity with the French baroque, the music of the Iberian Peninsula and English virginals music, she has performed on most of the playable virginals surviving in Britain and is working on a long-term project to collect a book of contemporary English pieces for this instrument.