This is volume 5 in Centaur's recording of the complete Pieces de Clavecin, performed on harpsichord by Mark Kroll. Mark Kroll has made a specialty of Couperin throughout his long and distinguished career. Mark Kroll has performed on four continents as a harpsichordist and fortepianist, in both solo recital and as a collaborative chamber musician. Highlights include an appearance as the official guest of the city of Barcelona; featured soloist in Germany’s Regensburg Early Music Festival, France’s Festival Ambronay and the Bordeaux Hummel Festival; two concerts for the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring Festival; and recitals at Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation, Rome’s Conservatorio Santa Caecilia and Associazione Musicale Romana, Poland’s Dni Bachowski, and Slovenija’s Radovljica Festival. This recording was made on a 1978 Franco-Flemish style double manual harpsichord by William Hyman and D. Jacques Way at the Harpsichord Clearing House, Rehobeth, Massachusetts.

Possibly, like me, the first time you may ever have met the name of Forqueray was when you first discovered the ‘Pièces de Clavecin en concerts’ by Rameau. In those chamber works, enlargements of solo harpsichord pieces, Rameau invariably pays tribute to some of his most interesting contemporaries. Amongst them were names which I thought I would never get to know further including ‘La Marais’ (Marin Marais), ‘La Laborde’ who features in the opening piece of Forqueray’s first Suite and ‘La Forqueray’ found in Rameau’s Fifth Suite, a Fugue in D minor composed apparently on the occasion of the wedding of Jean-Baptiste Forqueray. It’s intriguing that the movement ‘La Forqueray’ in the first suite here is also in D minor. It’s probably a character description of his viol-playing virtuoso father. Little did I know, until this CD emerged, that there were two Forquerays, father and son and both are featured on this disc. This also indicates how Brilliant Classics are imaginatively moving out from standard repertoire and re-issues.

The booklet essay, fascinatingly compiled by Lucy Robinson and entitled ‘A Case of Double Misattribution’ gives us some family background, which is useful and explains the music. It seems that in 1747 Jean-Baptiste had published pieces for viol composed by “M. Forqueray le père’. It seems however that they may not have been by him. The style, which is harmonically adventurous does not quite fit. Scholars now believe these pieces had been “thoroughly reworked” by the son. Jean-Baptiste tells us that he did write the bass line, “adding fingering and adding three pieces of his own”. Also the dedications are to the son’s contemporaries: Rameau, Leclair and one Buisson his brother-in-law and his solicitor Bourron! 

In the same year he then brought out his own harpsichord transcriptions of his father’s pieces which made excellent financial sense. 

According to the notes Antoine appears to have been a bit of a beast of a father, having his son incarcerated and then exiled for a number of years for some apparently minor thieving activities. It’s rather surprising then that his son took care to prepare the music for ‘clavecin’ so meticulously and brilliantly. He probably realized that many of these pieces are so fecund in imagination, so full of life and so original and sometimes so eccentric that by putting his own mark on them he wasn’t doing himself any harm. Anyway, his father’s fame had been widespread. He had been recognized as one of the greatest virtuosos whose music is even more difficult and extraordinary than that of the great Marais. In truth however Jean-Baptiste made very few alterations to the viol originals and where changes have been made it was not just to simplify or clarify but for purely musical reasons. Three of the pieces are by him, including ‘La Du Vaucel’, a rather pastoral piece to a man described as a “fermier généraux”. 

I managed to secure a photocopy of the Fifth Suite in C minor; the same published running order of pieces is retained in both versions. I assume this is so in all the suites. Several things immediately struck me. First, the clear fingerings and the figured bass as mentioned. Then the fact that the viol music is written on two staves: a bass and a C clef. Often the two move suddenly to bass clefs obviously giving a low tessitura mirrored by Jean-Baptiste. The suite begins with a serious homage to Rameau, returning the compliment, possibly. The most curious movement is the one reproduced in the booklet, ‘Le Leon’, which is notated in white notes because of its 3/2 time signature or as it is in the original 2/3. There are also instructions, which I’m not sure Michael Borgstede completely adheres to. They translate “In order to play this piece in the way I intended it, one must observe the placing of the notes; the upper part hardly ever coincides with the bass.” 

A standard form regularly found here and popular with French composers of this period is the Rondo. This is fine where the opening ‘A’ is arresting, as in ‘La Montiginio’ in Suite Five but on occasions as in ‘La Sainscy’ in the first suite, it can be a little irritating and tedious. 

Michael Borgstede’s playing is technically superb and he is a fine and experienced performer both as a soloist and as a member of the ensemble ‘Musica ad Rhenum’, a prolific recording group founded twenty years ago. Even so, I am not sure that he quite captures the composer’s intention. In the first suite for example does he really play La Clement ‘Noble et détaché’ or Le Carillon de Passy ‘Légérement sans vitesse’ as marked by the composers?

In all there are thirty-two pieces and the quality is not always consistent. Most are intriguing and often incredibly exciting. Three which stand out for me are, for sheer joy of living, ‘La Eynaud’ in the third suite and in the fifth ‘La Sylva’ which is melancholy and solemn in an alla breve time signature sensitively handled by Borgstede. The last piece of all, another Rondo ‘Jupiter’ is pure harpsichord music, using the full range of the instrument in a dramatic and spectacular way.

I’m not mad keen on the recording … or is it possibly the instrument. It is a copy of a double manual French harpsichord after Pascal Taskin (1723-1793). In so many pieces, which are pitched constantly in the lower section of the instrument even with octaves in the left hand, there is sometimes a lack of sharpness, which obscures the harmony. I have heard the tracks not only on my own stereo, but also in the car and on a friend’s fine equipment. I retain the same view although the bass does need to be turned down more than usual. 

Even so this is a fine set. The famous names of harpsichord composers have some competition here. These are pieces to which I will certainly return. 

-- Gary Higginson, MusicWeb International

Parthenia, or the Maydenhead of the first musicke that was ever printed for the Virginalls, is perhaps the most important early publication of English keyboard music. It was first published either late 1612 or early 1613 and, as its title indicates, was the first printed collection of keyboard music to appear in England. The “mastermind” behind Parthenia was the engraver William Hole, who conceived it as a wedding gift to Princess Elizabeth Stuart (the second child and eldest daughter of James VI and I) and Frederick V, Elector Palatine of the Rhine. Stage plays, musical performances, mock battles on the Thames, and fireworks were featured in the festivities which accompanied the ceremony. The original dedication to Parthenia contains a somewhat cryptic passage that singles out the “neighbor letters E and F, the vowel that makes so sweet a Consonat, Her notes so linkt and wedded together seeme liuely Hierogliphicks of the harmony of marriage…” The author has linked these two together because they represent the royal couple, E referring to Elizabeth and F to Frederick. These two pitches play a central role in the piece, being the two opening notes and each section following begins alternately on E or F.

In Stockholm during Johan Helmich Roman's lifetime, the recorder was the most common wind instrument, used throughout the social spectrum – including the Royal music establishment. The transverse flute, however, was generally the preserve of the nobility and bourgeosie. That hasn't stopped the celebrated recorder player Dan Laurin from taking up his countryman’s sonatas on his own instrument. With his fellow musicians in Paradiso Musicale, Laurin opts for a justifiably Italianate slant – providing great variety in realizations characterized by bold and striking harmonizations.

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, critically acclaimed artists of interntional renown- and also close friends- record together for the first time on this album of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas for violin and harpsichord. The artists approach these works as Bach intended: as trio sonatas with equally important roles for the violin and the harpsichord’s treble and bass lines. In addition to the six Sonatas, the album offers the remarkable and ravishingly poetic Cantabile, BWV 1019a, a free-standing work that Bach originally conceived as a movement of the Sonata, BWV 1019. Cedille’s audiophile engineering and the intimate acoustics of Evanston, Illinois’s Nichols Hall allow the complex trio textures to blossom with detail. In all, the album sets a new standard for a body of work that Bach’s son, CPE, considered among his father’s finest compositions. Rachel Barton Pine is a Billboard chart-topping artist. Her 2016 album ‘Testament,’ comprising JS Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin entered the Billboard Classical Chart in the No. 1 position, as did her 2013 Cedille album ‘Violin Lullabies.’ Making his Cedille label debut, Vinikour received Grammy Award nominations in the category of Best Solo Instrumental Recording for his 2013 album of modern American music for harpsichord and his 2012 release of Rameau’s complete harpsichord works.

With this disc, Miklós Spányi's survey of the complete keyboard concertos of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, begun in 1995, reaches its conclusion. But over the years it has already been described as 'a unique monument to one of the 18th century's most underrated composers' (Gramophone) as well as 'one of the most important and monumental recording projects of the century so far' (MusicWeb International) and 'an epoch-making achievement... in the history of recorded music' (klassik-heute.de). Together, the 64 works - composed over a period of fifty-five years (1733-88) - form an endlessly fascinating picture of their composer's various choices made in the course of a long career. They also illustrate the development of the concerto genre, and, indeed, of music itself during the mid-eighteenth century - a period of experimentation and great variety. All of these aspects are explored in an admirable fashion in the liner notes to the various discs, written by the C.P.E. Bach scholars Jane R. Stevens and Darrell M. Berg. Throughout the series, Miklós Spányi has performed the solo parts on harpsichord, fortepiano and tangent piano, carefully explaining his choices in his own remarks to each volume, and thereby providing much insight into a crucial chapter in the development of the keyboard instruments. The two double concertos on this final volume frame most of Bach's career, with the F major work for two harpsichords hailing from 1740 and the Concerto in E flat major being the fruit of the composer's final year. The latter work is intriguing in that Bach in his score specified that the solo parts should be performed on a harpsichord and a fortepiano respectively, resulting in some fascinating sound effects. The disc ends with a Sonatina for two harpsichords, composed in the 1760s, and remarkable for the size of its orchestra: the work employs the largest forces ever used by Bach, and forms a suitably resplendent finale to this great recording project.