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Delphina
Référence: DCD34314
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When the Handel (now Handel Hendrix) House opened in 2001, it could make use of only the top floors of the Mayfair property the composer had lived in from 1723 onwards, but when the late and much-missed harpsichord maker and technician Mark Ransom left the museum a generous bequest in 2020 it was at last able to begin work on opening up an extra floor downstairs, thereby making more room for its mouthwatering collection of original and replica keyboard instruments. This album, intelligently curated by Julian Perkins, is a happy celebration of that gift and of the enlarged museum’s reopening in 2023.
Handel is at the centre of it, of course, mostly played on a double-manual harpsichord by Bruce Kennedy inspired by the extended Ruckers 1624 instrument Handel is known to have owned. It’s the same harpsichord Laurence Cummings used in his 2008 recording of the Eight Great Suites of 1720 (Somm, 8/10), also made in the Handel House, and it presents much the same hard-edged, metal-tinged tone which, though clear and strong, can in truth wear the ear after too long in the hard-panelled rooms of Handel’s home. That’s not a danger here, however, as Perkins uses it only for the Second Suite, an arrangement of the Rodelinda overture, and a rather lovely early suite for two harpsichords (the lost second part here reconstructed), in which Carole Cerasi guests on the Kennedy while Perkins moves to a 1754 Kirckman, distinctively softer in sound as the two players swap parts in repeats.
The rest of the programme offers smaller Handel titbits: arrangements of vocal numbers or transcriptions of fugues – played either on one of the other more gentle harpsichords (a 1749 spinet and a copy of a c1720 William Smith) or on one of two hearty chamber organs (a copy of a John Smith and a 1752 ‘bureau’ organ by John Snetzler) – and other album-leaves from Handel’s London, by virtuoso transcriber William Babell (nice to hear some of his own music for once), serious organist John Stanley and Domenico Scarlatti, who was hugely admired in England at the time and whose two typically finger-challenging sonatas, played on the Kirckman (now sounding more zesty on its own), are prefaced by a specially made Introduction to Scarlatti’s Lessons by superfan Thomas Roseingrave.
Two fantasias by Handel’s faraway friend Telemann and a harpsichord transcription of Rhian Samuel’s nonchalantly bitonalfeel Sarabande (from her piano Isolation Suite of 2020) complete the recital, which is played by Perkins with exemplary taste, precision and love. Pick up a copy when you’re next in the museum! |
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