Word: harpsichords
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...Germans, the music of Johann Sebastian Bach is a jealously guarded possession, and judgments of any new Bach performer are sharply critical, especially if the performer is a foreigner. But last week a Munich audience applauded a harpsichord recital played by a middle-aged American housewife. As Virginia Pleasants performed Bach's French Overture and a Rameau suite, cognoscenti listened attentively, demanded seven curtain calls...
...temperament and color made her unsuited to the more popular romantics. Then her husband played a hunch. Henry Pleasants, onetime music critic for the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin and since 1952 a Foreign Service officer in Austria and Germany, thought that Virginia's real forte might be the harpsichord, which lacks dynamic range (it sounds almost the same whether whacked or stroked) and mainly requires delicate, precise fingering. It also requires good care: the slightest humidity change in the Pleasants' Bonn home makes their instrument go sharp in summer, flat in winter. In winter they boil as much...
...rock-solid rhythm, taste and imagination. Wrote one fan: "It seems that the dry, tinkling sounds emanating from this delicate box satisfy an inherent longing for an orderly perfection which has long been lost in our vulgar present day." Last week, as Germany's "Hausfrau at the Harpsichord" continued her triumphant tour, she said wonderingly: "Everyone makes me feel like something of a missionary...
Throughout the service the organ and harpsichord playing of Lois Pardue was exemplary. She was joined at the beginning of the program by two flutists in a lovely Bach sonata which benefited, as did the Choral singing, from the fine acoustics of Memorial Church
...Middle Ages to rock 'n' roll. And many of the greatest composers have failed at it. The high quality of the Valente and Sweelinck works was partially obscured by the numbing tediousness of the Pasquini and Soler. The Handel work--the so-called "Harmonious Blacksmith" set--comes from a harpsichord suite and does not belong on the organ, despite the glib statement in the program notes that the harpsichord is "interchangeable with the organ...