Ton Koopman is considered to be one of the world's leading experts in the performance of music of the baroque period and particularly that of J.S. Bach. As a harpsichord player and director of the group he founded, the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra & Choir, Ton Koopman has been a regular guest at leading concert halls in Vienna, London, Berlin, Brussels, Madrid, Rome, Salzburg, Tokyo and Osaka. Between 1994 and 2004 he conducted and recorded all the existing cantatas of Johann Sebastian Bach, and this series received many international awards, among them the BBC Music Magazine Award in 2008.

The authority on Rameau in the Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians spent a lot of words on these pieces. All YOU have to know is that the usual "continuo" situation of the bass instrument playing the same notes as those found under the harpsichordist's left hand is not present here. This is not a suite with violin on top and bass viol for continuo - but "concerted" harpsichord pieces with the help of a violin and a bass viol. The first and last suites are my favorites, but if you think you like French baroque music, you will thoroughly enjoy the whole disc.

It is tempting to see the history of music in Frescobaldi's time as a kind of Darwinian struggle between the conservative, rule-bound traditions of the sixteenth century and the freely expressive innovations of the early seventeenth century, or between the prima pratica of contrapuntal rigour and dry, intellectual structures, and the seconda pratica of the expressive madrigal, toccata and sonata with its emphasis on personal expression and freedom. For Frescobaldi, however, the two conflicting styles of composition amount to two facets of the same musical coin, which both shine brilliantly thanks to harpsichordist Hank Knox’s riveting performance on a magnificent 17th-century Italian instrument that is part of Kenneth Gilbert's collection of early harpsichords presently housed in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Chartres.

The first thing to strike the listener about these 2006 Avie recordings of Bach's Sonata for viola da gamba and harpsichord will be how loud they are. While neither instrument is noted for its power to project, the instruments are recorded so closely here as to be gargantuan in these recordings by Jonathan Manson and Trevor Pinnock. After adjusting the volume, the second thing to strike the listener will be how brilliantly played they are.

Some of the Baroque releases on Canada's ATMA label have stuck close to established molds, but this one by the young Québécoise harpsichordist Catherine Perrin breaks them all. Perrin's career is unusual in itself; while many performers of early music stick to the specialized circles of players who do the same, Perrin has parallel careers as a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio host, contemporary music performer, and musical theater enthusiast. Perrin subtitles her disc "Five Centuries of Preludes on the Harpsichord," but she intends something slightly different: an examination of the prelude as a musical idea. In her booklet notes she quotes writer Michel Chion, who situates the prelude in a space of unique freedom, "a privileged position in the vanguard," unleashed by "the fact that it occurs before the time has come to be serious or definitive.

Catherine Perrin's Ah! Vous dirai-je maman is a recital to show off the sound of a 1772 Jakob and Abraham Kirckman harpsichord, a dual-manual instrument with a pedal mechanism that allows the performer to switch from loud to soft stops quickly. She chose pieces that are contemporaneous with the instrument, which are almost always performed either on a fortepiano or modern piano, but they don't sound out of place on this harpsichord, just different. It has a light, elegant sound, not thickly metallic, and gives a lighter character to the music. Being a harpsichordist and not someone who has first learned these works on the piano, Perrin doesn't try to force anything out of the instrument that it can't produce.

The accomplishments of the virginalists, that school of English keyboard composers who flourished in the late Tudor and early Stuart eras, are documented in even the most succinct music history books. This recording proposes an overview of non-liturgical English keyboard music from about 1525 to 1650, written for an instrument then called the virginals. Because of its slower mechanism and rustic timbre, the "virginals" is used here for playing the earlier repertoire and for variations on folk tunes, whereas the harpsichord is reserved for the more extended virtuoso pieces. Harpsichordist and scholar Rachelle Taylor has given concerts and lectures in Canada, Europe, the United States, and Taiwan, and has been featured in broadcast concerts on the French and English services of the CBC.

Most of Tallis’s keyboard works are contained in the Mulliner Book, a 133-folio manuscript dating from the middle of the sixteenth century in which is found a great variety of liturgical organ pieces, dances, and arrangements of vocal and instrumental works by composers of the generation that preceded the great flowering of virginal music spearheaded by William Byrd. In contrast, a handful of pieces dating from a later period which might have been composed for performance in the Elizabethan Chapel Royal show a completely different complexion. They include two treatments of the plainchant Felix namque (the Sarum offertory Felix namque es, sacra virgo Maria) dated 1562 and 1564 in the Fitzwilliam Virginal Book, whose virtuoso manner is unparalleled in any other European keyboard culture of that period.

This disc will benefit from a strong curiosity factor, for the Goldberg who composed the music here is indeed the one for whom J.S. Bach is said to have composed his monumental Goldberg Variations for harpsichord, BWV 988. The story goes that the Russian ambassador to the Dresden court, one Count von Keyserlingk, had insomnia and wanted a long, gentle work that could be played by his house keyboardist, the then teenaged Goldberg, in the next room.

The cosmopolitan composer and harpsichordist Johann Jacob Froberger (1616-67) was born in Stuttgart. He spent much of his professional life at the court of Vienna but traveled widely to Italy, France, England, and the Netherlands. In his keyboard compositions, he acknowledged the divergent styles of his European contemporaries while forging a highly personal and musically powerful synthesis. Serving the Viennese Hofkapelle from 1634 until 1645, he was granted a stipend from the Italophile Emperor Ferdinand III to travel to Italy and supplement his musical training by studying with Girolamo Frescobaldi. He studied in Rome from late 1637 until 1641 and made a second trip to Rome, Florence, and Mantua before 1649. An extensive period of travel from 1649 to 1653 probably included trips to Paris (where he met Chambonnières and Louis Couperin), the Spanish Netherlands, and England.

Listeners familiar with other recordings in Masaaki Suzuki's ongoing traversal of Bach's solo keyboard works may find his performances of the Partitas somewhat of an anomaly. For instance, the sharply delineated juxtapositions of tempos that made his Fantasias and Fugues program so thrilling (type Q3840 in Search Reviews) are nowhere to be heard here. The interpretive agenda this time is much subtler and decidedly more introverted.

The world premiere recording of the complete Pieces de clavecin by Antoine Forqueray, court musician of Louis XN and one of the greatest viola da gamba players of all times. The Pieces de Clavecin comprise five Suites containing 32 pieces in total and were published after the composer's death by his son, the equally famous Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Forqueray in two versions: as viola da gamba solos with continuo and in a transcription for solo harpsichord, the latter being the better-known version.

The novelties here are the Mattheson works, the first two fully composed, the third a figured-bass exercise from Mattheson's treatise on the subject. The sonata is a dramatic, virtuoso outing in the Italian style; the suite, ostensibly more french in character, retains a typical German heaviness.

This Bach stretches, overflows, dares unexpected slow tempi and explores new territory. the first Partitas are exceptionally poetic. The fourth explodes in a multi-coloured fireworks display.. The sixth reaches zeniths of inspiration.

If you believe Charles Burney, the English music scholars and European travelers in terms of music, then was hard to determine what was miserable, the Italian harpsichords or the Italian harpsichordist in the 1770s. But an exception in his polemical verdict he would certainly have done with Baldassarre Galuppi (1706-1785), whom he visited in Venice in 1770. Galuppi was not only an excellent opera composer, but also devoted to keyboard instruments truly enchanting music that was like his Opere buffe Europe estimated. The famous Italian harpsichordist Luca Guglielmi has recorded for Accent nine of his sonatas on four different types of keyboard instruments (harpsichord, clavichord, organ and fortepiano) Italian origin - a successful and very entertaining vindication for Italian harpsichordist and their instruments.