The star of this recording is not so much the composer – or even the performers – as the instrument, a double harpsichord built in Lyons in 1777 by the Swiss maker, Jacob Stirnemann, now at the Geneva Museum of Art and History. To show it off to full effect, three musicians – one Danish and two Swiss – contribute highly individual performances of appropriate 18th-century German and French music to this disc.
Lars Ulrik Mortensen makes good use of the brightnesss of the top register, the sweetness of the middle and warmth of the bass in the three C P E Bach sonatas. He understands Bach – the idiosyncrasies, the charm, the drama (especially the management of silence) and, of course, the wit – and brings to the music an impressive range of articulation. He also persuades the harpsichord to sound almost ‘clavichordish’ in the opening movement of the B flat Sonata, the Larghetto of the D minor Sonata and the Allegro assai of the F major Sonata.
Anne Gallet has chosen pieces de clavecin by Couperin that lie in the middle and upper ranges and, by the delicacy of her touch, produces an exquisite, crystalline sound on the instrument. Although from very much the same period, the Rameau pieces performed by Christiane Jaccottet are much more robust and extrovert, in part because of their greater reliance on the bass. Jaccottet, in this valedictory recording (she died shortly afterwards), gives solid, controlled readings of the pair of gigues, ‘Le rappel des oiseaux’ and the darkly brooding, almost sinister-sounding ‘Tambourin’. Yet, at the same time, she offers here very individual interpretations of the Courante and Rigaudon that, in the former, surprise the listener with ritards and elisions of phrase and, in the latter, very nicely point up Rameau’s musical-architectural underpinning. The instrument seems to rise magnificently to any demand made upon it.
This recording offers a fresh angle on the value of new recordings, even of well-known repertories. In an era when performing on rare historic instruments is becoming more restricted, there is compelling justification for more recordings of this kind.'