The viola da gamba was already a rather old-fashioned instrument in Bach's time, and recordings of his sonatas for the instrument, with harpsichord, are not as abundant as those of sonatas for other instruments. Thus, this recording of Bach's three gamba-and-harpsichord sonatas is welcome, and it has many attractive features. Begin with the lively tone of Robert Smith's gamba, a modern replica of an instrument by the French maker Colichon. Listeners worried about whiny gamba tone have nothing to fear here; Smith's playing ...
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The viola da gamba was already a rather old-fashioned instrument in Bach's time, and recordings of his sonatas for the instrument, with harpsichord, are not as abundant as those of sonatas for other instruments. Thus, this recording of Bach's three gamba-and-harpsichord sonatas is welcome, and it has many attractive features. Begin with the lively tone of Robert Smith's gamba, a modern replica of an instrument by the French maker Colichon. Listeners worried about whiny gamba tone have nothing to fear here; Smith's playing is tonally secure and brisk in tempo. The balance and interaction between the two instrumentalists is another draw; these are not gamba-and-continuo pieces, but sonatas for gamba and obbligato harpsichord, and the players catch the unusual density of the music, with clean execution of the difficult harpsichord parts by Francesco Corti. The program is intelligently broken up by two non-Bach works; the Sonata in A major of Christopher Schaffrath is a galant work with chunky little...
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