To follow her excellent debut record of French baroque music (Chandos, 11/93), with an unusual and wholly admirable restraint Sophie Yates has chosen not any of the familiar showpieces of the harpsichord repertoire but the relatively little-known area of the early Iberian masters. That less of their music has survived than that of their contemporaries, the English virginalists, is attributed in a thoughtful note by Ivan Moody not only to composers jealously guarding their work for their own exclusive use, to economic reasons or to the great losses suffered in the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, but to the emphasis on improvised, rather than written-out, music. The techniques (often virtuosic) involved in this are illustrated in the many sets of diferencias (variations) which were a speciality of the time. Several examples are offered here, beginning with one on La dama le demanda (a version of the tune familiar as the ''Pavane'' in Warlock's Capriol Suite); others, also by the blind Cabezon, are on the Gallarda Milanesa and that favourite theme, the Canto del Caballero, in which the melody, instead of merely being treated with ever-increasing elaboration, successively passes to other voices in the texture.
Cabezon's son Hernando was more ambitious with his theme, Sandrin's popular song Doulce memoire (which was adopted by several composers); a still more substantial and diverse example is that by his Portuguese contemporary Coelho (whom he may have met) on Lassus's Susanne un jour; but the most striking (and most virtuosic) work in this field is the splendid Pasacalles by the much later Cabanilles. The Batalla here by him—not the one on the fifth tone that is usually played—is an extremely active and rather jolly affair.
All these pieces, and the contrapuntal tientos which make up the rest of the programme (which may have originally been intended for the organ rather than the harpsichord, though no hard-and-fast differentiation is possible), are played with engaging vitality and commendably springy articulation by Sophie Yates on a copy of an Italian harpsichord of about 1600. Full marks: more, please!'