Word: harpsichords
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...overstuffed parlor of an ungainly green-and-yellow hilltop house in Connecticut, the master of the harpsichord, stately, 77-year-old Wanda Landowska, sat down before the piano morning after morning to record her conception of Mozart. Around the frail old woman, in her gold slippers and purple kimono, hovered the engineers. For four and five hours at a stretch they recorded together, listened, recorded again. The fruits of a year's recording, released in a new RCA Victor album, constitute perhaps the most important single contribution to Mozart interpretation in his bicentennial year...
...tiny (4 ft. 10 in.) Wanda Landowska, the new album marks a return to piano recording after an absence of 20 years (she recorded Mozart's "Coronation" Concerto for the coronation of George VI in 1936). During part of that time she was engaged in her monumental harpsichord recording of the 48 rippling, finger-cracking preludes and fugues that constitute Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, which she called "my last will and testament." When she was persuaded to leave a codicil to that will, she turned again to the piano ("my first love") and to Mozart. She sighs...
...several deep orchestral chords seem to roll a tombstone over his entire century. Then Louis XV is on the throne; his meeting with Pompadour is set off by a lilting love song. Music marks a new culture, as from the palace windows twang the pure, shrill notes of the harpsichord. Explains Narrator Boyer: "Grace succeeds grandeur...
...Monteverdi's Tirsi e Clori Schmidt properly used a small body of singers. This so-called "ballo concertato" combined a light madrigal style of the Renaissance with an orchestra (harpsichord and strings) and the more impressive dimensions of the Baroque. Since the piece was originally written to be danced, it abounds in strong, bouncy rhythms. Before the chorus begins to sing, the title characters carry on a spirited dialogue, in which conductor Schmidt displayed his fine tenor voice in company with soprano Jean Lunn...
...Heartz' harpsichord playing had some rhythmic tentativeness and wrong notes, but was adequate on the whole. As soloist he played Byrd's showy Praeludium and jaunty variations on the folk tune The Carman's Whistle. But most intriguing was Hugh Aston's Hornepype, taken from the earliest source of English harpsichord music; this too was a set of variations--not on a tune, but rather on a repeated bass pattern. It is striking for its period in its unusual length, and in the fact that it has an ever-increasing intensity whereas most Renaissance pieces preserve their initial level throughout...