Sophie Yates’s 1993 debut CD offered a fine selection of French Baroque harpsichord music. For this second disc she has turned her attention south to Spain and Portugal and back to the 16th as well as 17th century. The repertoire, though less familiar, is certainly attractive – delightful examples of tiento and diferencias by Cabezón; Coelho’s compelling Segunda Susana; the ornate traceries of Ximénez and Cabanilles. And all played with a graceful eloquence that is quietly impressive.

Collections of Baroque keyboard music are often focused on famous French and German composers, so there's comparatively little available on CD of English harpsichord music of the 18th century, aside from recordings of works by Henry Purcell and George Frederick Handel. Considering the rarity of its material, Sophie Yates' 2016 album on Chaconne, The Pleasures of the Imagination, holds a certain appeal because its selections haven't been dulled by excessive anthologizing. While some of the composers' names may ring a bell, such as John Blow, Jeremiah Clarke, Thomas Arne, and Johann Christian Bach (the "London Bach"), their contributions here will be unknown to most listeners, while William Croft, Maurice Greene, and Richard Jones are known only to specialists in the period.

All the music in this programme comes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and most of it was collected by its founder, Richard, Seventh Viscount Fitzwilliam of Merrion (1745 – 1816). A polymath, lover of music, amateur composer and harpsichordist, musically active from about 1760 until his death, Fitzwilliam created a legacy of exceptional importance to English musical culture.

Absolutely first-class introduction to the brilliant world of early/mid 17th-century Italian harpsichord music, by one of the very best (THE best?) young players in a highly-competitive field. All the big composers are here in about the right proportion - yes, there's considerably more Frescobaldi and, to a lesser extent, Picchi, but also satisfying representative glimpses of vital historical figures like de Macque and Merulo. And ALL the selections are beautiful in themselves and superbly played. Yates is an expert on historical instruments and I think it shows in her discerning choice for this recording - she plays a Ransom & Hammett 1994 build based on Italian c1600 models.

Sophie Yates finds the right manner far all these works, the small and unassuming, the intricate and emotionally charged. Her sense of rhythmic flexibility is subtle. Her articulation of simultaneous musical strands - no mean feat even in the simplest of works performed on the virginal - is a delight.

Composer Claude-Bénigne Balbastre came at the end of the French Baroque keyboard tradition that produced François Couperin and Jean-Philippe Rameau. Composed in 1759, these pieces look back toward the tradition of French harpsichord music, with its individual piece titles designating various members of the French nobility and their individual personalities. Thirty years after Couperin announced the reunification of French and Italian tastes, they show only light influence of Italian style; the clearly diatonic, periodic Allegro tune of "La Laporte," track 16, is the exception. Nor does Balbastre attempt to take after the intellectual density and harmonic complexity of Rameau's keyboard music. Instead his little musical portraits have a mostly pleasant, pastoral mien, with harmonic touches that are unusual and evocative rather than difficult.

Sophie Yates began her career by winning the international Erwin Bodky Competition at the Boston Early Music Festival, and as a result she was invited to tour and broadcast throughout the eastern states of America. She now performs regularly around Europe, the United States and Japan, and has also worked in Syria, Morocco and Western Australia. Known for her affinity with the French baroque, the music of the Iberian Peninsula and English virginals music, she has performed on most of the playable virginals surviving in Britain and is working on a long-term project to collect a book of contemporary English pieces for this instrument.

With the exception of the final Chaconne of the second set, these discs contain the two sets of suites of 1720 and 1733 which are Handel’s most important keyboard music. It is an impressive achievement, with stylish harpsichord playing and a real sense of the energy and originality of these works. Repeats are taken, mostly with sensible ornamentation which never strays into tastelessness or exaggeration, and notes inégales are introduced in small amounts, especially in the allemandes, and with commendable moderation – a good thing, since we have little evidence about the extent to which Handel was influenced by this practice.

The Spanish and Portuguese influence in Domenico Scarlatti’s rhythms and, perhaps to a lesser extent, melodies are distinctive features of his keyboard style. Sophie Yates has chosen these evocative gestures in Scarlatti’s sonatas as determining characteristics of her recital Fandango – Scarlatti in Iberia. In fact, only four of the 13 items in her programme are by Scarlatti himself, the remaining pieces being by José Larrañaga, Seixas, Sebastian Albero y Añaños, and Soler, whose colourful ‘Fandango’ concludes her disc. Readers who know their Scarlatti will not need to be reminded either of the bold originality or of the wonderful variety of colours and sentiments present in his harpsichord sonatas.

This collection of 18th century harpsichord music brings together works by Johann Sebastian Bach, Jacques Duphly, Francois Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau, George Frederic Handel, Louis-Claude Daquin, and Guiseppe Domenico Scarlatti. The pieces go together nicely, not least because of the way in which Sophie Yates plays them.

Yates’s guileless approach really captures the music’s ingenuousness, even if she occasionally sounds a little too strait-laced. Her harpsichord (a copy by Andrew Garlich of an instrument made in 1681 by Jean-Antoine Vaudry, now in London’s Victoria & Albert Museum) could hardly be better suited to the music, with its sweet, warm sound, beautifully reproduced by the Chandos engineers, who don’t make the all too frequent mistake of recording the instrument too close.

The New Grove Dictionary has entries on 10 musically active members of the Couperin dynasty, of whom Armand-Louis is, chronologically speaking, the eighth. Born in 1725, he was the son of one of the great François Couperin’s cousins, and held a number of organ posts in Paris, including the virtually family-owned one of St Gervais, on the way to Vespers at which he was killed in a road accident just a few months before the Revolution. According to accounts he was a likeable man whose life was led free from strife and uncorrupted by ambition, and it is not fanciful to say that such are the qualities which inform his harpsichord music. Mostly rather rangy character pieces, though with a sprinkling of dances, they show the bold textural richness of the later French harpsichordist-composers, if without the galloping imagination of figures such as Rameau, Balbastre or Royer. Instead, they prefer to inhabit a contented rococo world, into which they bring considerable professional polish. If that makes the pieces sound predominantly ‘pleasant’, well, so they are… as agreeable a body of solo harpsichord music as any. But they are not vapid and neither are they easy, and we can be grateful that this selection has fallen to a player as technically assured and as musically sympathetic as Sophie Yates.

Johann Christian Bach's sonatas belong so much to the domain of the fortepianist that we forget how terrific they can sound on the harpsichord; they are by turns rhythmically engaging, almost jazzy, witty, sparkling, and expressive. By most accounts Bach played both instruments with equal facility and did not leave us a stated preference for one over the other, indeed if he had one. Sophie Yates has done very well to remind us with her superb Chandos recording Johann Christian Bach: Six Sonatas, Op. 5, that the London Bach need not be heard on fortepiano to be experienced to his best advantage; one may make the case that Bach's sonatas benefit to some extent from the brightness of the older instrument. Yates is the first artist to record Bach's Op. 5 as a set on the harpsichord; the only other complete recording of Op. 5 has been done on fortepiano, yet these sonatas are most commonly heard individually or mixed up with the later, "Welcker" Sonatas, Op. 17. Although they are difficult to individually date, Bach's Op. 5 was published in 1766 and all six are thought to date from his first four years in London; in her notes, Yates correctly observes the impact of Thomas Arne on Bach's style and of the general English approach to melody. Luckily in Bach's case the Italian manner had already held sway for some time by his arrival in London in 1762, so the learning curve was not a tough road to hoe for the Padre Martini-educated master.

There is no surviving autograph manuscript of Bach’s ‘English’ Suites, and for such a set of magnificent pieces, an important and well-loved part of the baroque keyboard ‘canon’, surprisingly little is known about its history. What we do know is that the suites are amongst Bach’s earlier works – probably written in the second decade of the eighteenth century – and that the appellation ‘English’ was not given to them until the 1750s. In order to understand these fascinating works on a deeper level, we have to appreciate the importance of dance in the cultural context of eighteenth-century Europe. As a social skill, the ability to dance correctly was considered so vital that every court had a Dancing Master, often French, who taught the different types of dances to aspiring courtiers.

A fascinating collection of German harpsichord music from one of the instruments finest exponents, Sophie Yates. The German composer Johann Jacob Froberger is the central figure in this collection and he was probably the most significant influence in the development of a distinctive, German style of writing for keyboard instruments. He wrote some twenty-five toccatas of which the two on this album are of very different character; the earlier one is very contrapuntal in style and makes use of a chromatic theme, whilst the other is written in a feer, more improvisatory style, and is harmonically very daring. Sophie Yates writes in her sleeve notes that she wished to include some of the darker more sensual suites, of which the C minor Suite is one of the most striking. Froberger is a colourful composer, and these varied suites, consisting of the usual dance numbers of the day, are most enjoyable. Johann Kaspar Kerll was similarly an innovator and is represented on this album by an impressive Passacaglia which places great demands on the player, Johann Pachelbel is probably most famous as a composer of sacred works and, of course, the ubiquitous Canon in D. Of his instrumental music, the Hexachordum Apollinis is his most well-known work, which comprises a set of six arias with variations, of which the last one is recorded here. George Böhm is best remembered for his influence on other composers, particularly J S BAch.