This disc provides a useful background to the current wave of enthusiasm for Jane Austen – or perhaps that wave to this disc, according to your point of view. Nearly all the nubile young women in Austen’s novels pursue, to a greater or less extent, the genteel accomplishment of an ability to play a keyboard instrument; and here, culled from two eighteenth-century collections, are the kind of things that would have been in circulation for much of that century. Tunefulness (or ‘airyness’, as it was called) ranked high among the qualities favoured; but except for ever-popular Scottish tunes – one is left speculating whether Blue Joak referred to a Jock or could possibly have meant a blue joke – that would not have put too great a strain on those of modest attainments, the majority of the 46 pieces selected are technically considerably more demanding. These range from early Italianate toccatas by Amadori and Simonelli via French court dances (some by Raphael Courtville, sometime organist of St James’s, Piccadilly – an ornate Saraband by him is noteworthy) and later English styles, including opera arias (among them an attractive jiggy In vain is delay), dance forms (an anonymous D major Allmand is appealing), to Richard Jones and Handel. Some pieces, admittedly, are trivial, but a really worthwhile discovery is a five-movement suite by “Mr Henry Hall of Hereford”, who had been a fellow-chorister with Purcell in the Chapel Royal. Employing a fine 1732 Hancock spinet, Chapman projects all her selections with precision, neat ornaments and rhythmic energy. Don’t try to listen to too many tracks at a stretch, though.'