Fleetness of finger, on which these early Italians (like their opposite numbers, the English virginalists) set much store, is a requisite for performing this repertoire; and in this Sophie Yates is eminently accomplished. Another requisite is to convey a sense that the music is being improvised on the spur of the moment. This is especially so in toccatas, which by their very nature call for fantasy and freedom, but it also applies to some extent in the outwardly stricter form of partite or variations, the commonest structural basis for keyboard music of the time. Yates provides a firm framework for Frescobaldi’s variations on the Follia ground bass (not the same as the Corellian one), but while neatly pointing its rhythmic quirks allows herself greater freedom in the set on the Romanesca (a formula as familiar at the time as the 12-bar blues today); and she clearly relishes the harmonic twists in the (more than 100, in fact) variations on Passacagli. Valente’s variations on the Passamezzo antico (another popular ground) are different in kind, more overtly dance-like and lively, with a strongly marked rhythmic accompaniment. There are two canzone – keyboard versions of songs – here: a highly elaborate working by Merulo of Lasso’s famous Susanne un jour, and an extraordinary piece by Gesualdo (the “Principe” is presumably himself) which contains some weird and wonderful chromatic trills.
The imaginative toccata by Rossi, full of kaleidoscopic changes, also astonishes with some bold rising chromatic harmonies, made even more bizarre-sounding by the tuning system adopted on this copy of an Italian harpsichord of about 1600. The most developed of the toccatas here is that by Frescobaldi, which inserts a formal contrapuntal section into its otherwise free style. Not the least of the pleasures on this disc is Yates’s vigorous playing of four tuneful dances – Polish, Hungarian, German and a ‘personal’ one – by Frescobaldi’s contemporary Picchi, of whom little more is known other than that he was an organist in Venice: how this dazzling Toccata of his found its way into the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book is a minor mystery.'