The insert-notes for this mixed harpsichord and fortepiano programme suggest that the point of it all is to demonstrate something about the period when the two instruments were both in use. I can't see it myself. Better, I would have thought, to stick to the simpler but more valid explanation of it as a recital of late eighteenth-century keyboard music by composers from North Germany. They are, by and large, the expected names, though none the less interesting for that. Here we have the urbane opera composer Hasse, writing in an up-to-date sonata idiom, the more old-fashioned Graun sticking to the dance forms of the suite; the talented Georg Benda, whose five little sonatas show a moody succinctness of utterance that reminds us that he was an admired composer of melodramas and the eminent C. P. E. Bach, seen here in unusually unbuttoned mood offering a few 'friends pictured within' in a selection of his epigrammatic Pieces Caracteristiques. The other two composers represented are slightly more obscure, though certainly worthy of inclusion. ''Much fire prevails, combined with much delicacy'' is how Charles Burney described the music of Carl Friedrich Christian Fasch, an opinion substantiated by the theme and seven variations offered here; while Johann Abraham Peter Schulz shows a Mozartian expressiveness well suited to the piano on which his two pieces are played.
Christine Schornsheim is a name new to me, and I enjoyed her cultured touch and tight control of rhythm and articulation. Although a slightly surprising number of smudgy wrong notes have survived on to the final recording, she has a strong-boned technique on both instruments which is complemented by a bold, slightly echoing acoustic, and while she never makes the mistake of overcooking things, she is responsive to the music's more expressive moments (making especially good use of the fortepiano's effective una corda pedal in the Schulz). Such a clutch of unfamiliar names may be off-putting to the unadventurous but this is both a stimulating and a well-executed recital.'