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.
That harpsichord may well have served as the inspiration for this recording's repertory. Built by Joannes Goermans in 1768, restored in 2014 by John Phillips and now housed in Delaware in North America's most important private collection of historic harpsichords, this instrument stands as an ideal emblem of the decadence of the harpsichord's twilight years. Its tonal qualities are most remarkable for their wild diversity, rather than for any suavity or balance. The disposition of 8′ + 8′ + 4′ + buff is familiar to harpsichordists trained in the era of the historically informed performance movement, but its garishness is perhaps something of a surprise. The Goermans harpsichord features an aggressively booming bass register and a bitingly frontal (and comparably dry) upper register, which are as distinct from one another as might be possible in a single instrument. Despite the fact that Charles Burney claimed, as mentioned in the disc's interesting liner note by Karen Flint, that French instruments of the mid-century were ‘more delicate than powerful’ (8), the music of this period generally exhibits a bombastic showiness that flies in the face of François Couperin's aesthetic proclamation that it is better to be moved than to be astonished. Goerman's harpsichord suits the style of this music perfectly, and the expertly recorded sound of this disc (characteristic of Plectra's output in general) provides an experience of the visceral sonic appeal of this repertory when played on a historic instrument from this late period.
Pearl's disc opens with a virtuosic set of pieces from Balbastre's first publication of solo suites, dated 1759. Pearl has selected three pieces from this book, and Flint's note helpfully provides interpretations of their various titles: ‘La de Caze’ (named for the book's dedicatee), ‘La d'Héricourt’ (most likely named for M. l'Abbé d'Héricourt, conseiller de Grande Chambre) and ‘La Lugeac’ (presumably named for Charles-Antoine de Guérin, a page of Louis XV honoured as the Marquis de Lugeac). Although Pearl's own liner note asserts the ‘rollicking’ and ‘outrageous fun’ of this music (17), what perhaps most admirably marks his playing here and throughout the disc is a sense of controlled restraint; the performer's maturity robs the listener of none of the joy of this difficult music, but he also does not indulge in the interpretative idiosyncrasies that have marred some earlier recordings of this repertory. This is playing that will bear repeated listening and will weather well in the future.
The maturity of this playing is perhaps tempered by one programming decision: the performer's mixing and matching of pieces in different keys. In the Balbastre set under consideration, Pearl has logically moved from a set of pieces in C to conclude with one in F, creating a sense of harmonic direction. In his recording of music by Duphly, he more extremely combines a piece in D major, the glorious ‘Les Grâces’, with three pieces in F major and F minor (a chaconne, ‘Médée’ and ‘La Forqueray’.) The combinations are dramatic and the individual pieces expertly played, but the admixture of keys seems to stand in contradiction to the French tradition of collections of pièces, consistently gathered together by key and presumably intended to be played en suite. One assumes that the performer's selections here represent a grab bag of his favourite late harpsichord works, chosen for their appropriate fit on the Goermans harpsichord and for their various opportunities to show off the performer's virtuosity. As such, their collective charm on this recording overcomes any sense that the programming might be improved were it more closely to adhere to the sense of tonal organization implied by the original publications’ groupings by key.
Even in the comparatively rarefied world of solo harpsichord music, we have hit a stage of saturation where some justifications for a recording's existence must lurk behind any assessment of that output: do we really need another recording of X, Y or Z? In the case of this disc, we have neither newly recorded works nor any sense of an authoritative, complete recording of a single composer, publication or group, the common practice for issues in this Plectra Music series. What we do have is an immensely appealing potpourri of late harpsichord works recorded on a lovingly restored and unique historic instrument by a player who combines maturity and sensitivity with a masterful technique. These admirable features justify this recording's existence quite sufficiently, and the beautiful capturing of the Goermans harpsichord's sound alone lends this disc a ‘must-buy’ status for the collector interested in historic instruments. If we are left wanting more, it is merely that Pearl will follow this up with a second solo recording offering a more encyclopedic approach: we eagerly anticipate his recordings of the complete works of Duphly, Balbastre, Forqueray and the like.
