Handel's Keyboard Works
Handel's Keyboard Works
The Gramophone Choice
Handel Keyboard Suites – in F, HWV427; in D minor, HWV428; in E, HWV430. Chaconne in G, HWV435 D Scarlatti Keyboard Sonatas – in B minor, Kk27; in D, Kk29; in E, Kk206; in A, Kk212; in C sharp minor, Kk247; in D, Kk491; in A, Kk537
Murray Perahia pf
Sony Classical SK62785 (69' · DDD) Buy from Amazon
In his projection of line, mass and colour, Perahia makes intelligent acknowledgement of the fact that none of this is piano music, but when it comes to communicating the forceful effects and the brilliance and readiness of finger for which these two great player-composers were renowned, inhibitions are thrown to the wind. Good! Nothing a pianist does in the Harmonious Blacksmith Variations in Handel’s E major Suite or the Air and Variations of the D minor Suite could surpass in vivacity and cumulative excitement what the expert harpsichordist commands, and you could say the same of Scarlatti’s D major Sonata, Kk29, but Perahia is extraordinarily successful in translating these with the daredevil ‘edge’ they must have. Faster and yet faster! In the Handel (more than in the Scarlatti) his velocity may strike you as overdone but one can see the sense of it. It’s quite big playing throughout, yet not inflated. Admirable is the way the piano is addressed, with the keys touched rather than struck, and a sense conveyed that the music is coming to us through the tips of the fingers rather than the hammers of the instrument. While producing streams of beautifully moulded and inflected sound, Perahia is a wizard at making you forget the percussive nature of the apparatus. There are movements in the Handel where the musical qualities are dependent on instrumental sound, or contrasts of sound, which the piano just can’t convincingly imitate. And in some of the Scarlatti one might have reservations about Perahia’s tendency to idealise, to soften outlines and to make the bite less incisive.
Additional Recommendations
Keyboard Suites – in F sharp minor, HWV431; in G minor, HWV432; in F minor, HWV433; in B flat, HWV440; in G, HWV441; in G, HWV442 – Preludio
Sophie Yates hpd
Chandos CHAN0688 (71' · DDD) Buy from Amazon
Sophie Yates brings formidable technique and strong dramatic feeling to these suites. The works of the first collection (1720, HWV426-33) are the more demanding, each of them opening with a prelude (or overture) – complex, pensive, often sombre – with a large-scale, fully worked fugue. Yates plays these in an appropriately rhetorical manner, rhythmically taut yet with enough flexibility and attentiveness to the music’s caesuras to shape and characterise it, at the same time giving it some sense of the improvisatory. Then she takes the fugues at a lively pace, just a touch too fast for the music to sound comfortable: this is brilliant, edge-of-your seat playing.
Her playing, with its thoughtful details of timing, clearly conveys the structure of the music. She finds the same grandeur of manner in the Passacaille that ends the G minor Suite. For the rest, it’s mainly dance music: some lively courantes and exuberant gigues, sober and deliberate allemandes, spacious and noble sarabandes – the crisp and precise fingerwork in that of the B flat Suite in the Second Set (1733), with its intensely detailed line, is a delight.
These are the most appealing versions of Handel’s suites: fresh, alive, with a real command of style and technique but also just a hint of risk about the playing. Handel’s harpsichord music has sometimes been called dull, but there isn’t a moment here when you’d believe that.
Handel Chaconne, HWV435. Keyboard Suites – in F, HWV427; in F minor, HWV433 Haydn Keyboard Sonata No 62, HobXVI/52. Sonata un piccolo divertimento: Variations, HobXVII/6
Angela Hewitt pf
Hyperion CDA67736 (67’ · DDD) Buy from Amazon
Isn’t it odd to lump Handel with Haydn? Not for Haydn who, like Beethoven, thought Handel the greatest composer of all. Not for Angela Hewitt either, but for different reasons. She senses an emotional affinity between the composers, just as she senses religious connotations in the music of Bach.
In her booklet-note she also ‘unashamedly’ admits to sharing with him a relish for an old edition of Handel’s Chaconne that differs from one based on other sources. And she observes the repeat only in the theme, not in the variations. ‘Authenticists’ might be dismayed and might even quail at her introspective rubato in the Suites, two of eight that Handel himself published in 1720 when George I granted him a Privilege of Copyright.
But that’s Hewitt, individual, and equally probing in the deeper waters of Haydn’s Variations where, towards the end, the music reflects a composer whose own faith seems to be sorely tested by personal tragedy. Hewitt is with him in his sobriety, lightness, fury and eventual exhaustion. Regrettably she omits the whimsical five bars – included in the autograph but not in Artaria’s first published version – that bridge the last variation to the return of the theme. Yet all has to be forgiven as Hewitt unfolds the drama of the last sonata through proud gesture and pathos. Rhetoric may be understated but her point of view grows with repetition. The recording never stands in your way.
