What a difference the size of a room can make when you listen to a harpsichord record. Egarr’s instrument, a 1991 copy of a 1638 Ruckers, has a warm, rich, bell-like sound that came through vividly in the small room in which I played these discs for the second time. The previous day I’d put them on in a cavernous, high-ceilinged room that reduced the sound of the harpsichord to a sort of musical mumble; every piece began to sound the same.
So I’d learned something new to me; a listening space suitable for orchestral music — or a stentorian Steinway — may be all wrong for something as intimate as a harpsichord recital. Egarr’s WTC (using a tuning system “deciphered” by Dr. Bradley Lehman in 2004) is a shifting landscape of moods and colors, and even the harpsichord’s lack of dynamic contrasts takes nothing away from the dramatic pairings of these preludes and fugues, in which the former pose dark, doubting questions to which the latter reply with a combination of impulsive fantasy and intellectual rigor that leaves me breathless.
Rating: 4 / 5
What a difference the size of a room can make when you listen to a harpsichord record. Egarr’s instrument, a 1991 copy of a 1638 Ruckers, has a warm, rich, bell-like sound that came through vividly in the small room in which I played these discs for the second time. The previous day I’d put them on in a cavernous, high-ceilinged room that reduced the sound of the harpsichord to a sort of musical mumble; every piece began to sound the same.
So I’d learned something new to me; a listening space suitable for orchestral music — or a stentorian Steinway — may be all wrong for something as intimate as a harpsichord recital. Egarr’s WTC (using a tuning system “deciphered” by Dr. Bradley Lehman in 2004) is a shifting landscape of moods and colors, and even the harpsichord’s lack of dynamic contrasts takes nothing away from the dramatic pairings of these preludes and fugues, in which the former pose dark, doubting questions to which the latter reply with a combination of impulsive fantasy and intellectual rigor that leaves me breathless.
Rating: 4 / 5