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  • Death and the Mayerin:Germanic harpsichord music
  • Bradley Lehman

As Wagner pointed out, all music proceeds in adagio character at some level. It follows that a contrasting vivace is a part of all music too. Musicianship is the ability to balance these characters and motion, gauging the flow from moment to moment. The listener's attention in a good performance is kept moving between foreground, background and middleground, sensing temporal dimension the way an eye is engaged by a painting. Musical notation can scarcely suggest this appropriate balancing of structure and detail. The performers must tease it out and project it, often with more than one character simultaneously. That is a particularly challenging interpretive task with all the composers under review here-Froberger, Buxtehude, and the Bachs-as they all excelled at drawing various bits of the French, Italian and German arts into their own synthesized styles.

The new Froberger discs from Sergio Vartolo, Froberger: Toccatas and partitas (Naxos 8.557472-73, rec 2003), and Assi Karttunen, Memento mori Froberger (Alba Records 196, rec 2003), include the affable Mayerin variations FbWV606, and three of his four celebrated 'death' pieces: the meditation on Froberger's own future death (with the whole suite in D, FbWV620), the lament for Roman king Ferdinand III (FbWV633), and the Blancrocher tombeau (FbWV632); the fourth piece, for Ferdinand IV (FbWV612 with its suite in C) is on Vartolo's set. All four of these are by far the most-recorded music by Froberger. I have more than a dozen recordings of each, starting with Thurston Dart's 1961 set (L'Oiseau-Lyre 60038). The playing here by Karttunen and Vartolo is fine and worth hearing, to be sure; but why must we have these same pieces yet again, as cornerstones of Froberger recitals? Other parts of the Froberger repertory-widely available in print for at least 100 years-remain largely unexplored on disc, except in the comprehensive sets by Egarr and van Asperen (in progress, including newly discovered music). Especially neglected is Froberger's music in keys of three and four sharps.

Both these new recordings of Froberger's bifurcated-personality music focus especially on his musical views of death. Did Froberger have other personal or musical temperaments, in addition to melancholy? How much range is appropriate within a single performance? How broadly can his notation 'avec discretion' be extended? With discretion is there indulgence of emotion, austerity, or a blending of both levels of involvement for simultaneous dimension?

As the late Howard Schott suggested in the 1990 Montbéliard Froberger colloquium (published as 'Parameters of interpretation in the music of Froberger' in J. J. Froberger: musician européen, 1998), the discretion in words and notes is an attempt to write out the unique and improvisatory rhythmic features of a style, realizing that it can never be captured fully. Vartolo's thorough booklet notes for Naxos draw out similar points about the complex phrasing and textures. Froberger himself, aware that taste and freedom cannot be taught adequately without direct demonstration, wanted to have his manuscripts destroyed after his death. Fortunately for us, they have not been, and some are still being discovered. (See also Timothy Roberts's review, 'Froberger's secret art', EM, xxxiii/2 (May 2005), pp.340-43.)

For a listener new to this composer's work, I would have to choose Enrico Baiano (1997, Symphonia 96152) and David Cates (1997, Wildboar 9701), each for their range of expression. But for balance next to those two intense programmes, as a companion disc for something more relaxing overall, I might well choose the Karttunen. She plays on a German-style double by van Schevikhoven (1997), with an unspecified tuning near Vallotti's. Her performances here are supple, genteel, and moderate: direct and clear with the expression, while also letting it feel like graceful dance. The easy flow reminds me of Ludger Rémy's approach in his Strasbourg Manuscript set of Froberger (2000, CPO 999750): a - delivery that illuminates the music without drawing attention to itself.

Karttunen's concerns are equally clear in her playing and her programme notes: '[Froberger...

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