Adam Pearl: Pièces de clavecin

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2020

Publication Title

Eighteenth-Century Music

Volume

17

Issue

2

First page number:

279

Last page number:

81

Abstract

For his debut solo recording, harpsichordist Adam Pearl has issued a disc in Plectra Music's series ‘Le clavecin français’ (https://www.plectra.org/blank). This labelling may prove somewhat deceptive among devotees of the harpsichord repertory, for whom such a phrase may conjure up names like Chambonnières, D'Anglebert and, particularly, Couperin – men intimately connected to the establishment of a French harpsichord tradition in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Pearl's disc represents a different side of the claveciniste coin: later music of the 1740s to the 1760s, virtuosic compared to the intimacy of those predecessors, showing distinct signs of the Italianate and internationalizing influences that marked the tides of musical change during this period everywhere, including France. This disc features works by Claude Balbastre, Jacques Duphly, Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Forqueray (le fils, arranging his father's viol music for solo harpsichord, perhaps with the aid of his wife, Marie-Rose Dubois) and Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer. The result is a sensitively played, interestingly programmed and varied recital on a nicely recorded historic harpsichord.

Controlled Subject

Music; Harpsichord music

Disciplines

Music

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