This is a significant recording for several reasons. Sergio Vartolo has now recorded all of Frescobaldi’s keyboard music (the other issues were on the Tactus label). The Fantasie (1608) and Ricercari (1615) are the earliest of Frescobaldi’s keyboard publications (the latter being issued in the same year as the more famous first book of Toccatas), and as far as I’m aware neither had been issued complete before; so to get both together, and at super-budget price, is treasure-trove indeed. Frescobaldi fanatics need read no further.

Unless, of course, they have prior knowledge of Vartolo’s other recordings, in which he spins out the music at twice the length of most other interpreters. This can be rather off-putting, and does not always help the listener to grasp the overall design of formally complex pieces like the Toccatas. But these Fantasias and Ricercars are imitative, fugal pieces, more abstract in conception than the exuberant toccatas; recognising this, Vartolo avoids extreme tempi, and instead gives measured performances that gain in clarity what they have lost in eccentricity. These are (and this is not intended to damn with faint praise) sensible performances, that give both composer and audience their due. Vartolo loosens up a bit in the playful Canzoni Francesi that conclude the book of Ricercars, but in this he follows the composer’s lead, and demonstrates his own sensitivity to style: the canzoni are particularly interesting as indicators of what was to be Frescobaldi’s future development, whereby the rather sober style of the imitative pieces was to become increasingly inflected by the freer genres of succeeding publications.

Vartolo mostly performs on a modern copy of an Italian harpsichord, and on the organ of the Chiesa del Spirito Santo, Pistoia (built a few years after Frescobaldi’s death). The latter has a trick or two up its sleeve, but I won’t spoil the surprise. Suffice it to say that this recording would be a must-have at full price; as it is, you won’t find better value anywhere.