Andreas Staier’s informed and inspired interpretations have left their mark on the discography of both the harpsichord and the fortepiano and have enabled us to see Bach, Mozart and Schubert in a completely new light. This is Staier’s first solo album of a projected series for Alpha Classics, in which he also presents his own compositions for the first time. “Two motifs connect the works in this recording: the first is a ancient cantus firmus, a melody in long notes […] the second is the interval sequence of octave, fifth, sixth, and third. […] Anklange, my six pieces for harpsichord, grew out of several conversations I had with the composer Brice Pauset about what it means to compose in our time, and in particular what it implies to compose for historical instruments. This led me to ask myself how I could express and capture my own conception of music in notes, marked as it is not only by Byrd, Bach and Schubert, but also by the music of the 20th and 21st centuries."

REVIEW:

This release is a good example of Andreas Staier’s intelligent program building, both intellectually and musically speaking. Two motifs form a thread that runs through most of the works assembled here. One is the note sequence E–F-sharp–A–G-sharp–F-sharp–E that appears in Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s E major Prelude and Fugue from Ariadne Musica, Bach’s E major Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, plus Froberger’s Fantasia II and Ricercar IV (the latter transposed to begin with G). The other motif is based on a sequence of intervals: octave, fifth, sixth, and third. Other pre-Bach composers include Louis Couperin and Johann Joseph Fux

At the recital’s midpoint, Staier features his own six pieces for harpsichord composed in 2020 that comprise a suite entitled Anklänge. His style forgoes tonality for the most part, yet his boundless palette of sonorities, his dramatic registral deployment, and his instincts for when and how to leave space all generate palpable tension and release. The fourth piece, for example, makes arresting use of thick spread chords that resonate for a long time under the fingers, while No. 6 features aphoristic lines that unfold like skywriting, with plenty of air between each utterance.

Indeed, resonance and breathing room characterize Staier’s performing style, which revels in the colorful variety of stops offered on his harpsichord modeled after a 1734 Hieronymus Albrecht Hass model. You’ll notice this in how Staier times and differentiates his arpeggiations of chords throughout the Couperin Pavane, as well as in the melting impact of his masterful finger legato in the Froberger Meditation. Surprisingly, Staier takes a forthright tempo for the aforementioned Bach Fugue, where his octave couplings have a rather upholstered effect that, for my taste, works against the music’s reflective and vocally oriented nature. Still, Staier remains the masterful instrumentalist and thinking musician that has long enamored me to his extensive and wide-ranging discography.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

English harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland has completed the third volume in his ongoing series of the complete Suites for Harpsichord by Johann Jakob Froberger. The album was recorded at Holy Trinity Church, Weston, Hertfordshire on 11-14 July 2022, with engineer John Taylor who produced all of Gilbert’s previous Divine Art and Athene recordings. The first two volumes of the series has attracted much praise from critics for its "glorious sound" and "energy and a good forward drive" of Rowland's playing.

Johann Jakob Froberger was a highly accomplished composer of the middle Baroque period and credited with inventing the ‘baroque suite’ used with variations by Bach, Handel and countless other composers. He was extremely prolific and several of his works, including the Harpsichord Suites, have been discovered recently.

Gilbert Rowland first studied the harpsichord with Millicent Silver. He made his debut at Fenton House in 1970 and first appeared at the Wigmore Hall in 1973. He has made numerous recordings of works by Scarlatti, Soler, Rameau and
Fischer which have received considerable acclaim from the national press. He joined Divine Art in 2010 to record the harpsichord suites by Handel, followed by those of Froberger and Mattheson and was assigned to Divine Art’s specialist
early music label, Athene.

Gilbert Rowland is one of Europe’s most senior and accomplished exponents of the harpsichord. Following his critically acclaimed 6-album series of the Harpsichord Suites of Handel for Divine Art, he moved to the Athene imprint which now specializes in baroque music and ‘period’ instruments for his well-received album of Suites by Johann Mattheson and his first volume of Froberger’s Suites. This 2-album set is the second volume in a projected complete survey of the Harpsichord Suites by Johann Jakob Froberger, whose organ and harpsichord music is individual in nature and ground breaking – he was one of the first composers to settle the ‘dance-movement’ style of Suite taken up by Couperin, Bach, and Handel among many others. There are 12 Suites in this collection. Gilbert Rowland plays a 2 manual French style harpsichord made by Andrew Wooderson after an instrument by Goemans (Paris, 1750)

Made between December 1948 and June 1950, these recordings enjoy an unusual history which is bound up with the burgeoning industry of classical music retail in the postwar era. Among the best stocked record stores in New York at that time was The Gramophone Shop on 42nd East Street, co-owned by William H. (Bill) Tyler and Joseph F. (Joe) Brogan, an Irish-American collector and dealer. Trying to rival or surpass the mail-order business of H. Royer Smith in Philadelphia, the shop issued (in 1929 and 1931) two fat paperback catalogues, The Gramophone Shop Encyclopedia of Recorded Music. Three further editions, from 1936, 1942, and 1948, remain standard reference works. The store also ran it's own mail-order business with the reputation as a specialist in rare and high-quality recordings from Europe. From that arm of the business naturally developed the store's own label, marketed as the Gramophone Shop Celebrities (GSC) series. This is the first time these recordings have been available on modern media.

In the post-Renaissance period, the lamento established a place for itself in both vocal and instrumental music. This grief-stricken utterance in the face of death – one’s own imminent demise, that of a loved one, a lamentation that may be either sacred or secular. The present release from Café Zimmerman presents 9 lamentos from composers such as Bach, Bernhard, Biber, Schmelzer, and more. Founded in 1999, Café Zimmermann is one of the leading Baroque ensembles in France and in the rest of Europe. Led by violinist Pablo Valetti and harpsichordist Céline Frisch, the ensemble brings together soloists who are eager to bring back to life the artistic atmosphere conveyed by Gottfried Zimmermann’s establishment in 18th century Leipzig. Café Zimmermann collaborated with artists such as Emöke Barath, Giuliano Carmignola, Rupert Charlesworth, Lorenzo Coppola, Maarten Engeltjes, Damien Guillon, Kristina Hammarström, Christian Immler, Roberta Invernizzi, Sophie Karthäuser, Gustav Leonhardt, Lenneke Ruiten, Carolyn Sampson, Andreas Staier, Dominique Visse, as well as the choirs Les Elements, Aedes, Vox Luminis and Accentus.

The ever-inquisitive pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar presents The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music. The Long 17th Century refers to the period from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, an era noted for forward-thinking individuality and invention in all areas of life. This two-and-a-half hour recital surveys a pan-European variety of styles, genres and techniques, and comprises 36 works, each by a different composer, many not recorded before on a modern piano. Daniel-Ben Pienaar has been critically acclaimed for his previous albums on Avie: “a gloriously multi-faceted opus maximus ... Amazing and very much worth hearing” –Der Spiegel(on Beethoven’s Complete Piano Sonatas, AV2320) “dizzying virtuosity ... fresh, spontaneous, original readings that shed new light on the keyboard player’s Bible” –BBC Music Magazine (on J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, AV2299)



REVIEWS:

Have you noticed the growing trend of pianists taking up 17th-century keyboard works on the modern concert grand? Perhaps it has to do with the desire to be rebellious, or to attain a certain level of intellectual caché. Yet pianists also have valid artistic reasons to explore this repertoire. First and foremost are the sheer musical rewards. Secondly, the freedom one has in regard to phrasing, tempo, and embellishment can be liberating and creatively stimulating. For this remarkable two-disc collection, Daniel-Ben Pienaar has chosen 36 17th-century keyboard works, each by a different composer. He brilliantly reveals how a piano’s dynamic scope, timbral diversity, and sustaining capabilities can vividly and meaningfully serve this repertoire.

One noticeable example is in Tarquino Merula’s Capriccio cromatico, where the ascending legato chromatic lines and detaché counterline with repeated notes take on distinctive characters. The Weckmann D minor Canzon’s virtuosic repeated notes gain color and drama through pianistic inflection, and via Pienaar’s dapper fingerwork, of course. Terraced dynamics and half-tints of pedal evoke trumpets and winds in Gabrieli’s joyous Canzon quarta.

What bracing trills and hair-trigger scale passages Pienaar delivers throughout Muffat’s Partita IV, while serving up a more unified and colorfully contrasted reading of Buxtehude’s large-scale “La Capricciosa” Variations than most period performers manage to do. And while Pienaar allows for pockets of space or “air” between the notes in Keril’s Passacaglia, he manages to shape the sounds and silences into long-lined entities. I encourage listeners to discover their own favorite works and magic moments across this intelligently programmed, splendidly engineered, and boundlessly satisfying release.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)

What makes it work is not just the dazzling precision and clarity of Pienaar’s finger technique (though that is certainly a vital factor), but the intelligence that has gone into his interpretations. He also communicates an individual and convincing vision for each piece, enough for every one of them to give delight.

–Gramophone (Editor's Choice; June 2020)

Four centuries after his birth, Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-1667) is still able to reach listeners with his moving compositions. Powerhouse composers like Bach and Mozart studied Froberger’s works, and his influence in the world of Western music cannot be overlooked. This release is the eighth installment in the Froberger series, and includes the toccatas performed on harpsichord, as well as two Elevation toccatas and an organ toccata. Motets are also performed in their world premiere recordings.

This is the third volume of the Froberger Edition, and completes the set. Containing the complete Libro Quarto and the suites XV and XVII, this album showcases these mature works. For this recording, harpsichordist Bob van Asperen performs on a historic French harpsichord of an unknown maker, dating around 1700. The works were recorded in the incredible acoustics of the “sala nobile” of the Villa Medici, Rome. This release includes a 48 page booklet in which Bob van Asperen comments on works recently ascribed to Froberger.

A "seventeenth-century Art of Fugue" -- The seventh volume of the Froberger Edition on Aeolus is perhaps the craziest: a roller-coaster ride through the world of the fugue, performed with virtuosity and the spirit of adventure. Bob van Asperen plays himself here into an absolute frenzy! Froberger's Capriccios show a composer who not only perfectly mastered his métier, but drove his art forward to new heights. Not without reason, the accompanying text (written by the performer) points out many connections to the works of J. S. Bach. With Bob van Asperen, the Edition features an exceptional interpreter who performs these works just as passionately as knowledgeably. Eighteen multi-part Capriccios are to be heard, also including a recently discovered work. As in all the other volumes of the Edition, an important historical instrument is employed: here it is the large Arp Schnitger organ of the Ludgerikirche in Norden (Eastern Friesland, Germany), which with its numerous stops allows the wealth of polyphony to resound.

"People loved him because of his good nature, even if they did not understand his art." Thus wrote Sibylla, Duchess of Württemberg, Froberger's last patron and his "humble forsaken pupil". She places a finger squarely on two fundamental aspects of Froberger's life: his modest and unostentatious character and the extreme subtlety of his music. A pupil of Frescobaldi and exponent of Couperin, Froberger's complete works remained unpublished until 1897 and it is only in the last half-century that more and more keyboard players have started to feel the persuasion of his secret and inward music. The present recording explores some of the music in the earliest of the three surviving Froberger autographs housed in the Austrian National Library, the Libro Secondo of 1649. Colin Tilney is internationally known for his harpsichord, clavichord and fortepiano playing, with many solo recordings on DG (Archive), EMI Electrola, Decca, Hyperion, Dorian, etc. For Music &Arts he earlier recorded Bach's English Suites on an antique Italian harpsichord, the French Suites on clavichord, an album of fugues by Bach and his forerunners, and a Scarlatti disc.