Luogo e data di registrazione		(luogo di registrazione non indicato) - 1964
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer		Wolf Erichson
	Prima Edizione LP		Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | SAWT 9463-B (Stereo) - AWT 9463-C (Mono) | 1 LP - durata 47' 26" | (p) 1964 | ANA Telefunken "Das Alte Werk" | 6.41065 AS (SAWT 9463-B) | 1 LP - durata 47' 26" | (p) 1964 | ANA | Riedizione
	Edizione CD		Warner Classics "The New Gustav Leonhardt Edition" | 01902964467714 | 35 CDs | (c) 2022 | ADD/DDD - CD 25: Frescobaldi - CD 20: Couperin - CD 24: Böhm - il brano di Johann Sebastian Bach non è stato ripubblicato in compact disc. E' probabilmente riconducibile alla pubblicazione Telefunken LT-6609 Mono.
	Cover		Frans van Mieris "Dame am Klavier".
	Note		-

Girolamo Frescobaldi, the "mostro degli organisti" and "wonder of the keyboard" as his amazed contemporaries called him, was the last great innovator and formative influence in the history of Italian harpsichord and organ music. He was also its most outstanding master, standing at the end of a long development and on the threshold of a revolutionary change in style, and he combines all the forces of tradition into a new entity and then transforms them. With the confident feeling for form and the clear reason of the Latin renaissance musician he extends the traditional forms of harpsichord and organ music into mighty structures. He places treatment of motifs side by side with turbulent, virtuoso passage work, and thus raises the more modest ‘occasional music’ of his predecessors to the plane of the most fastidious artistic work. By deriving all the motifs of a work from one single thematic idea on the variation principle, he renders the confusing profusion of traditional forms - toccata, fantasie, ricercar, canzona, capriccio - more like one another, thus making them more adaptible for the expression of new, subtile contents. And thus, alongside Sweelinck, he has become at the same time the consummation of a tradition and the progenitor of baroque organ and harpsichord music. Froberger, Tunder, Buxtehude and even Bach (who copied his works for his own use) have all built on the foundations laid by Frescobaldi. The two Toccatas (to be played on the harpsichord) on this record reveal to us Frescobaldi's art on its solitary heights: a profusion of sharply contrasted emotions, changing like a kaleidoscope. The three-part Fantasia, on the other hand, clear and simple in its structure, demonstrates in the strictness of its fugato development sections, with their skillfull augmentations and diminutions of the two "soggetti", the austerity and dignity of this art which are in keeping with the older traditions. At the same time, however, we find in the urgent chromaticism of the middle section a subjective agitation that belongs to a new era. François Couperin, who was already rightly known as "le grand" by his own age, appears in our eyes as the French composer who was nearest to and at the same time furthest away from his great German contemporary Bach. Like the letter, he is the consummator and transformer at the same time of native and foreign - particularly Italian - traditions, an unexcelled master of the “réunion des deux gouts" which was also theoretically discussed and disputed at that time. But in contrast to Bach he stood, as court organist and music teacher to the royal family, in the brightest splendour of the court, thus forming the natural centre of gravity of the country's entire musical life. And whereas Bach was stricter, striving towards the monumental, tending towards the conservative, Couperin loved the kaleidoscopic change of affects, forms and techniques within the smallest possible space. He is the great master of the miniature form of seemingly superficial, almost rococo playfulness, through which shines a nervous sensibility, a peculiarly Mozartian chiaroscuro. The eight Préludes from his great work of instruction in the French-baroque art of harpsichord playing, the “Art de toucher" of 1716, are in the keys of the first eight "ordres" (Suites) of harpsichord pieces that Couperin published at the peak of his career, and were intended to serve as preludes to the latter. The subtle riches of this art come to life in their full entirety in these delicate, fragile and scintillating miniatures when we listen to them in the right spirit: delicate, hardly figurated chains of chords and suspensions (No. 1), the subdued dignity of French overture strains (2, 5, 7) and strangely veiled dance forms, hidden under a fine fabric of embellishments, the expression ranging from carefree gaiety to that brooding melancholy that was so disturbing and enigmatic to Couperin's contemporaries. The keyboard suites of Georg Böhm, who was organist at St. John's Church, Lüneburg, over a period of many years, are the work of a German who takes the French keyboard style as his model. The French elements are the arrangement of the movements (which does not, however, allow the player a choice between several versions of the individual movement types), and the mode of writing in a semi-polyphonic, loosely “broken” style, especially in the Allemandes and Courantes. German, on the other hand, is the interpretation of these elements: the warmth, the homeliness and, even more, the preference given to eloquent invenion over formal perfection. The Suite No. 8 in F minor is the only to include a Ciacona, deliberately so named rather than Chaconne, since it is an example of the Italian type which, without fixed thematic material, varies a short harmonic sequence. In the F minor Ciacona each variation consists of four bars. This is the only example of instrumental programme music in Bach's entire works. We know that the musical language of his cantatas and oratorios, inspired by pictures, concepts and situations of the texts, attains a high degree of almost illustrative perspicuity. In his purely instrumental compositions, on the other hand, there are no examples of extensive tone-painting, let alone music prompted by an extra- musical programme. This youthful work is the only exception. Bach wrote it for a family gathering of the Bachs at Arnstadt in 1704, on which occasion his elder brother Johann Jakob took leave of his family. He was going to enlist as a colonel in the army of King Charles XII of Sweden and go to the wars. The events of this departure and their reflection in the souls of those left behind are depicted by Bach with much imagination, humour and skill in composition: the “coaxing of the friends in order to dissuade him from his journey“ (coaxing sixths, suspensions full of sentiment) - “the misgivings regarding all that could happen in remote lands“ (ungainly fugal writing with a melancholy F minor con- clusion) - "the general lamento" (strong chromaticism) - the final farewell (in full, urgent chords) - the song of the postillion and the arising of a more confident mood (a somewhat ostentatious fugue). The dear relatives will certainly have enjoyed this little masterpiece, and being musically educated they are sure to have known the model that had stimulated the young Sebastian: the “Musical Representation of some Biblical Stories“ by Johann Kuhnau, cantor of St. Thomas’, Leipzig, which had appeared a short time previously. transl.: D.G.E.