Davitt

John Holloway and Davitt Moroney have set up a musically rewarding partnership in these brilliantly inventive works, furthermore adding to their programme the two lovely sonatas for violin and continuo long attributed to Bach, and justly so. In both of them they are joined by Susan Sheppard (continuo cello). For these sonatas Moroney has preferred a chamber organ to a harpsichord.

The third in a series of four releases in the Complete Keyboard Works of François Couperin, this three-CD set includes Couperin's third book of harpsichord pieces. Featuring internationally acclaimed harpsichordist Davitt Moroney, this recording showcases two historically important instruments: the 1627 Ioannes Ruckers harpsichord and the 1768 Joannes Goermans harpsichord.

L'influence de Francois Couperin sur ses contemporains et ses successeurs de l'école francaise de clavecin voire même à travers l'europe, tel est le programme éminement didactique de Davitt Moroney dans son pur style des années 1990, celui des émissions qu'il animait sur France Musiques.

The harpsichord music of François Couperin (1668 –1733) is without question some of the instrument’s most important repertoire. His treatise L’art de toucher le clavecin [The Art of Harpsichord Playing, 1716] outlines the principles of good harpsichord playing, with information on ornaments, fingerings, and touch, and includes eight preludes and an Allemande. His four monumental volumes of harpsichord music contain over 230 individual pieces, and rare is the player who undertakes learning the entirety of this body of work. Davitt Moroney, a performer-scholar who has already recorded the complete works of Byrd and Louis Couperin, as well as the complete Well-Tempered Clavier, is currently recording these works for the Plectra label on magnificent antiques from the Flint Collection in Wilmington, Delaware.

William Byrd - The Complete Keyboard Music - Davitt Moroney (1999) {7CD Set, Hyperion CDA66551/7}
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© 1999 Hyperion Records | CDA66551/7
Classical / Renaissance / Period Instruments

The Gramophone Award-winning artist, Davitt Moroney has spent more than fifteen years planning this momentous project and Hyperion are proud to be able to bring Davitt’s wealth of expertise and musicianship to the label. As an authentic complete survey of this music, six different instruments have been used for the recording – two different harpsichords, muselar virginal, clavichord, chamber organ, and the Ahrend organ at L’Église-Musée des Augustins, Toulouse, France (where the huge and high nave creates an echo that lasts for nearly fifteen seconds, not unlike the acoustic at Lincoln Cathedral where Byrd was the organist and master of the choristers).

Biber's 15 Mystery Sonatas with their additional Passacaglia for unaccompanied violin were written in about 1678 and dedicated to his employer, the Archbishop of Salzburg. Each Sonata is inspired by a section of the Rosary devotion of the Catholic Church which offered a system of meditation on 15 Mysteries from the lives of Jesus and the Virgin Mary. The music isn't, strictly speaking, programmatic, though often vividly illustrative of events which took place in the life of Christ.

The introductory Ricercar and the first group of Canons are presented clearly but not pedantically on one or two harpsichords, and the sensitively played Trio Sonata follows, given added color by using flute, violin and continuo. The Canon perpetua is then heard on the same combination and, for all the remaining Canons except one, Moroney returns to his harpsichord(s). Good recording, truthfully transferred.

This is one of the monuments of recorded music, a magnificent undertaking. Everything Moroney touches comes up sparkling; it is perfect in every detail: musical, academic, technical, you name it.
This disc received the 2000 Gramophone magazine award for "Best Early Music Recording."