This disc of music from the early Baroque and late Renaissance -- in the realm of keyboard music the distinction is much less clear than in vocal music -- is performed on a moderate-sized, newly restored Italian organ whose voice is marvelously well suited to the repertoire. Performing even the big contrapuntal pieces of Girolamo Frescobaldi on a modern organ tends to obscure details in the music and the variety of sounds it contains, to dampen the exciting feeling of a group of musicians working in a genre that was rapidly ...
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This disc of music from the early Baroque and late Renaissance -- in the realm of keyboard music the distinction is much less clear than in vocal music -- is performed on a moderate-sized, newly restored Italian organ whose voice is marvelously well suited to the repertoire. Performing even the big contrapuntal pieces of Girolamo Frescobaldi on a modern organ tends to obscure details in the music and the variety of sounds it contains, to dampen the exciting feeling of a group of musicians working in a genre that was rapidly growing. Frescobaldi is one of the few composers who are at all familiar in the set presented here. Most are Italian (Giovanni de Macque was one of the last of the Netherlanders to make the transalpine trek), and the outlines of the music are conventional for keyboard music of the years around 1600: there are toccatas, ricercare (the polyphonic ancestor of the fugue), a few pieces based on dances that were nevertheless fully usable in liturgical contexts, short variation sets, and...
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