JC SMITH Six Suites of Lessons HANDEL Riccardo Primo Overture
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: John Christopher Smith, George Frideric Handel
Genre:
Instrumental
Label: Chaconne
Magazine Review Date: 09/2015
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 77
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: CHAN0807
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Riccardo Primo, Re di Inghilterra, Movement: Overture |
George Frideric Handel, Composer
George Frideric Handel, Composer Julian Perkins, Harpsichord |
Six Suites of Lessons for the Harpsichord |
John Christopher Smith, Composer
John Christopher Smith, Composer Julian Perkins, Harpsichord |
Author: David Vickers
His music occupies a strange sort of halfway territory between the late Baroque style and the progressive early Classical mould, and Julian Perkins captures the dichotomy of mid-18th-century England’s Scarlattian obsession and the emerging rococo style in his judicious playing of Smith’s Six Suites of Lessons for the Harpsichord, Op 3 (printed by John Walsh in 1755) – although he prefaces it with Handel’s own short harpsichord arrangement of the overture to Riccardo Primo.
A single-manual English harpsichord, probably made by Mabyn and William Bailey (London, c1770) is used in flat-key suites, but for the suites in sharp keys Perkins plays a bigger Franco-Flemish double-manual instrument (each instrument is tuned to a different temperament as well as offering distinctive sonic palettes). The larger instrument is used with delicate refinement when necessary (eg in the Larghetto from No 1 in A major), whereas the Gavotte that ends No 4 in D major has crisp theatricality. The ‘fruity’ sound of the smaller English instrument is to the fore in the concluding Allegro in No 2 in C minor, in which more than a splash of Handelian repeated-note rhetoric is developed with tense chromaticism; its lute-stop is reminiscent of a softly lyrical mandolin in the central Allemande in No 3 in F major and the Gavotte that ends No 4 in B flat major. These playful lessons amply repay Perkins’s curiosity.
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