Word: harpsichords
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...Dichter compiled an impressive catalogue of old American sheet music, began selling it to collectors. Then he decided that reprints of the sheet music would find a greater audience. His first big publication was an edition of delicate melodies titled Seven Songs for the Harpsichord, by Musician:Politico Francis Hopkinson (1737-1791). Hopkinson, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, had sent his work to George Washington, received a polite acknowledgement from the President: ". . . what alas! can I do to support it? I can neither sing one of the songs nor raise a note on any instrument to convince...
...last spring a young (28) Manhattan musician named Fernando Valenti found himself stuck in a customs office in Peru. That big instrument he had with him, said the officials, was undeniably a piano, and therefore subject to import duty. It was not a piano, insisted Valenti; it was a harpsichord. Then and there, the oldtime mechanism of strings and quills was uncrated, and Valenti sat down to play while some 150 people listened. After an hour of music, officialdom was satisfied, and Valenti proceeded on his concert tour. "I have never refused to do anything unusual," he says, "so long...
...direct musical descendant of modern harpsichord greats (he is a pupil of Ralph Kirkpatrick, who is a pupil of Wanda Landowska), Fernando Valenti thinks harpsichordists must play for wider and wider audiences if interest in the instrument is not to die out. He is building a reputation as one of the most imaginative harpsichordists in the U.S., giving some 20 solo recitals a year and lecturing about the music he plays. Valenti has begun a musical marathon: recording all 555 of Scarlatti's gemlike Sonatas (for Westminster). In the past three years he has completed 72, but half seriously...
...staging miscalculation in Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 placed the harpsichord, with its top open, too far in front of the other soloists. Consequently, Dorothy Bales' violin was rarely audible and Howard Brown's flute tone almost completely lost. Joel Spiegel man played the extremely difficult keyboard part with impeccable technique and phrasing, but the total effect was unfortunately like a harpsichord concerto with occasional phrases for violin and flute...
...Friday night, the faculty's second spring concert opened with Manuel de Falla's Harpsichord Concerto. While de Falla's music has a strongly Spanish flavor, it is not the tambourine-and-castanets omelet favored by Rimsky-Korsakov and Bizet. Rather, he uses irregular rhythms, unresolved harmonic tensions, and occasional folk tunes to create an atmosphere of barely concealed Latin violence. The jangling sound of the harpsichord and an accompaniment reduced to five instruments further the effect and connote its inspiration: the sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti. Harpsichordist Melville Smith and his ensemble did full justice to lyrical elements...