Jean-Henri d'Anglebert: Prelude and Allemande in G Major (for harpsichord) скачать в хорошем качестве

Jean-Henri d'Anglebert: Prelude and Allemande in G Major (for harpsichord)

Jean-Henri d'Anglebert (1629-1691) Prélude and Allemande from Suite 1 in G major Played by Luke Arnason on a French harpsichord after Blanchet, at a=392 hz This is the first installment in my project to record d'Anglebert's entire suite in G Major (and, later on, the others too). But it's been a long time since I last posted anything, and these two pieces stand alone just fine. These pieces also illustrate everything that is wonderful about d'Anglebert's music (I have to confess that for me, d'Anglebert is the be all and end all of harpsichord music... yes, d'Anglebert and not Bach: troll away!). On the one hand, the unmeasured prelude illustrates d'Anglebert's attachment to the free style pioneered by Louis Couperin and Jacques Champion de Chambonnières. On the other hand, d'Anglebert was also influenced by Lully, and regularly played continuo for the ballets and other divertissements that Lully created at the court of Louis XIV in the 1660's to 1680's. He transcribed a number of Lully's orchestral pieces for solo keyboard (I'll record some of those soon, I hope!). To my mind, his work with Lully had 2 main effects on his compositional style. On the one hand, you can really tell that d'Anglebert was a continuo player. His left hand parts tend to be very simple and chordal, while the much more florid right hand acts in a more melodic way and captivates our attention, while the left hand just fleshes out the texture. In that sense, even his regular suites (as opposed to his transcriptions of orchestral music) do have a somewhat orchestral quality with a sense of continuo in the left hand and obligato (including some simple polyphonic motifs like you might find in the strings parts to a Lully or Charpentier ballet) in the right hand. The other main influence of Lully's music on d'Anglebert is the sheer grandness and loudness. The poet La Fontaine complained about the transition away from the softer more intimate lute and chamber music of the early 17th century into the booming orchestral and operatic music that flourished under Lully in the second half of the century. D'Anglebert seems to be emulating this new, Louis-quatorzien grandness in his harpsichord music, which is more lush in texture than the previous generation of harpsichord composers, while still retaining the elegant spontaneous quality that Chambonnières pioneered. And therein lies the real genius of d'Anglebert's music in my mind: he is the master of texture. By nature, the sound produced by a harpsichord begins to decay immediately, so it's harder to give a beautiful melodic line on a harpsichord than on, say, a violin. D'Anglebert gets around this constraint through an elegant mix of florid ornamentation (which through the constant movement of trills, mordents and "ports de voix" avoids obvious decay) and incredibly original and elaborate arpeggiations of chords. Combine this with the quite extensive compass of the French harpsichords available at court and the composer's savvy use of its different registers, and you have the richest, most expressive, dramatic, and elegant palette ever heard on this relatively inexpressive instrument. The abundance of ornamentation in d'Anglebert's music is technically demanding (I found it very frustrating when I began studying harpsichord), and to many modern listeners it probably seems over the top. But I suspect d'Anglebert was simply one of the first to experiment with notating what musicians were doing anyway, and in so doing, giving a sense of what style of ornamentation constituted the "bon goût" of the court.