Okay, that was weird. Did Angela Hewitt -- a Canadian avatar of musical heresy of Bach on the piano -- really have a harpsichord chattering along behind her in this recording of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto? Did the Australian Chamber Orchestra -- in all likelihood the finest ensemble of its kind and size from the land down under -- really have the light-fingered Linda Kent providing the continuo on a performance whose ostensible raison d'etre is to demonstrate the efficacy of using a modern hammer-and-metal concert ...
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Okay, that was weird. Did Angela Hewitt -- a Canadian avatar of musical heresy of Bach on the piano -- really have a harpsichord chattering along behind her in this recording of Bach's Fifth Brandenburg Concerto? Did the Australian Chamber Orchestra -- in all likelihood the finest ensemble of its kind and size from the land down under -- really have the light-fingered Linda Kent providing the continuo on a performance whose ostensible raison d'etre is to demonstrate the efficacy of using a modern hammer-and-metal concert grand piano rather than a pluck-and-quill two-manual harpsichord? Apparently so; and yet one cannot deny that, despite the musical oxymoron of having the two keyboards existing in the same piece at the same time, Hewitt, Kent, and the Australian Chamber Orchestra's version works wonderfully well. There is wit and joy and sorrow and a sort of multi-keyboard ecstasy in the performance, which, despite the blatant disregard of authentic performance practice, still sounds...
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