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Reviewer: Lindsay Kemp One can sense Glen Wilson’s frustration when in the bookletnote for this release he directs us towards a more extensive essay on the Naxos website. He is referring specifically to an Allemande which represents a near-drowning incident, a narrative which only came to light in 1999 and for which the full explanation is presumably too long to include in Naxos’s skinny insert; but the longer essay shows that there are many more thoughts Wilson was unable to fit in, or that have been included in such filleted form that they challenge the reader’s understanding. Why 23 suites instead of the usual ‘complete’ 30? Well, because Wilson has rejected some as spurious and unworthy, and others because their final version is in another recently found manuscript not yet available to scholars. Why no repeats? Because Wilson does not want to confuse Froberger’s spirit with the ephemeral ornamentation repeats would demand. And why such surprisingly slow courantes and gigues? Because this is how Wilson, citing written evidence, believes them to have been played.
All very
musicological – an ‘audio version of a printed edition’ as Wilson puts it. Yet
Froberger was one of the most humane composers of the 17th century, and it would
be a cold player indeed who did not respond to the searching expressiveness not
only of his allemande-form meditations and lamentations, but of many other
movements as well. Wilson does not fail them. A pupil of Leonhardt (himself a
great Froberger player), he seeks a similar ‘delicate balance of freedom and
rigour’, resulting in deeply considered interpretations, never hurried or
frivolous, but with each note given proper placing and weight. The effect might
seem at times to toy with ponderousness, but given full attention it can draw
you into the rhetorical moment and hold you there in anticipation of the next.
If the gigues are slow compared to a more free-spirited player’s idea of them,
Froberger’s writing is certainly strong enough to take it, and different
beauties can emerge. And nobody could accuse Wilson’s final track, the wondrous
‘Lamentation for Ferdinand III’, of lacking in free-flowing, wrenching emotion.
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