French Harpsichord Music

Recorded from 1977 to 1978 and re-released in 2003, this CD box consists of 12 CDs. It contains the complete harpsichord music by the French master of early piano music. This box is a storehouse of valuables.
Couperin's piano music was of course written with the harpsichord in mind; so was Bach's piano music, simply because there was no pianoforte yet…

Since you can find plenty of excellent single-disc harpsichord Goldbergs with all repeats, why even consider this recording? For the simple reason that Kipnis offers one of the most technically accomplished, individualistic, and deeply musical recordings of the Goldberg Variations ever made–that’s why! You’ll have to search far and wide to find Goldbergs so brilliantly thought out yet seemingly spontaneous, so stylistically sound yet utterly unacademic, so unpredictable in detail yet profoundly true to the composer’s spirit.

The discovery of music manuscripts from the estate of composer and music journalist Johann Mattheson in Armenia has been the cause of great excitement for fanciers of the German Baroque – here, finally, is the opportunity to get to know this friend of Handel and Bach whose written words are so eloquent and informative, yet whose music has proven so elusive. Nevertheless, first things first – Brazilian-born harpsichordist Cristano Holtz makes the first comprehensive recording of a Mattheson set that has been available all along in Ramée's Johann Mattheson: Suites, namely the set of 12 harpsichord suites Mattheson published in England in 1714 and in Germany a little later. "Comprehensive" should not be taken to mean "complete"; this 75-minute disc contains a little less than half the set, with four suites presented in excerpted form. Purists may cry foul, but the full set of 12 suites would probably last about three hours in performance, and one is thankful to Ramée for restricting the release to a single disc and highlighting the good parts.

Three suites, including an ‘English’ Suite quite as ‘French’ as its counterpart that actually bears the name; a brilliant Italianate Toccata; a Prelude and Fugue displaying the most complex German counterpoint . . . In this programme, Céline Frisch offers a wide-ranging panorama of the protean genius of Bach the harpsichord composer.

This 2CD set aims to give the listener a good idea of the range of music composed by a remarkable musical dynasty, the Forqueray family. They were a family of organists, viol players and harpsichordists. They were every bit as remarkable as the other great musical dynasties, the Bendas, Stamitzs, Bachs, and the Strauss family. The most famous member of the Forqueray family (their Johann Sebastian) was Antoine, who was born in 1672, a virtuoso gambist. His output forms the backbone of the French repertoire for this instrument.

During the 18th century it became common for Italian composers, whose principal instrument was not the keyboard, to produce collections of harpsichord music. It was, effectively, a chance to demonstrate versatility and bring one’s music to a wider audience, and Geminiani was one of several musicians to embrace this: hailed as one of the great violin virtuosos of his time, he also enjoyed a fruitful career as a composer, teacher and writer of music, and in 1743 published the first of his two contributions to the keyboard repertoire – Pièces de Clavecin.

AEOLUS presents the second volume of the Louis Couperin Edition with Bob van Asperen. The recording was made on the 1681 Vaudry harpsichord in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum and is currently the only audio document available of this famous instrument. The SACD contains harpsichord suites composed by Louis Couperin, who lived in Paris in the 17th century. Among the pieces is the famous "Tombeau de Mr Blancrocher".

The accomplishments of the virginalists, that school of English keyboard composers who flourished in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras, are documented in even the most succinct music history books. This recording proposes an overview of non-liturgical English keyboard music from about 1525 to 1650, written for an instrument then called the virginals. Because of its slower mechanism and rustic timbre, the "virginals" is used here for playing the earlier repertoire and for variations on folk tunes, whereas the harpsichord is reserved for the more extended virtuoso pieces. Harpsichordist and scholar Rachelle Taylor has given concerts and lectures in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Taiwan, and has been featured in broadcast concerts on the French and English services of the CBC.

Johann Jacob Froberger (1616 - 1667): Fantasia. Pieces for Harpsichord and Organ. Performed by Siegbert Rampe on six historical harpsichords from the collection of Andreas Beurmann and on the organ built by Hans Scherer, Junior, in 1624. The recordings were made in July 1996 at Schloss Hasselburg near Neustadt in Schleswig-Holstein (harpsichords) and at St. Stephan's Church in Tangermünde, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany.

By Leslie Richford (Selsingen, Lower Saxony)

Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer may not have been a great composer, but he was an important one, not least because his Ariadne musica–20 preludes and fugues in most of the available keys–clearly inspired Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier. Fischer's Musical Parnassus consists of nine suites of harpsichord music more or less in the French style (as he understood it), each named for one of the muses, though without any descriptive intent in this regard. This first disc contains the first six suites, and in case you've ever wondered how certain French record labels (Calliope and Erato, to be specific) got their names, now you know.