Luogo e data di registrazione		London (Inghilterra) - 1978/1979
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Lucy Robinson / Colin Tilney / Adam Skeeping / Nic Parker
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 069-46 406 - (1 lp) - durata 48' 09" - (p) 1982 - Analogico
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26528 2 - (1 cd) - durata 48' 09" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

Colin Tilney plays German Harpsichord Music History has allotted Georg Böhm the role of a John the Baptist to the Jesus of Johann Sebastian Bach. It is a role he shares with a number of other composers. In answer to a question from J. N. Forkel, Bach’s first biographer, C. P. E. Bach wrote of his father's musical education: “Besides Froberger, Kerll and Pachelbel, he heard and studied the works of Frescobaldi, the Baden Capellmeister Fischer, Strunck, some old and good Frenchmen, Buxtehude, Reincken, Bruhns, and the Lüneburg organist Böhm." We can see from the obituar notice of 1754 how justly the son placed his father above contemporaries and predecessors, but Emanuel clearly did not underestimate these men whose music had formed Bach’s taste and skills: the first three he calls “the most famous masters of the day” and Böhm he actually names as Bach’s ‘teacher’ in Lüneburg although he later had second thoughts and crossed the word out. The adolescent chorister at the Michaels-Gymnasium and the established organst of the nearby Johanniskirche may not have been formally master and pupil, but there must have been contact and there was certainly influence. History’s liking for simple tendencies and definitive end-products has occasionally to be checked and turned about, so that prophets become messiahs for a day and Böhm’s splendid music can be heard without prejudice or comparison. A Thuringian like Bach, Böhm spent most of his thirties in the important cosmopolitan city of Hamburg (a town that Emanuel associates specifically with the French style in the forming of his fatherßs experience). In 1698 Böhm moved to Lüneburg, where he remained until his death in 1733. Although he wrote many cantatas and sacred songs, Böhm is chiefly remembered for his keyboard music - preludes and fugues for the organ, French suites for the harpsichord, and chorale variations for both instruments. He published nothing, and the various manuscript sources of his works, usually without concordance, are unreliable in text and perhaps also in ascription. The fifth suite in the collected edition has now been firmly attributed to Froberger; conversely, genuine pieces by Böhm may still be awaiting discovery or correct assignment. Under these circumstances judgment of Böhm’s achievement seems unwise, but a special and quite distinctive voice can surely be heard in most of the harpsichord music - inventive, passionate, mercurial, sometimes witty, given to harmonic daring and often drawing on the syncopation techniques of the French lutenists. The sixth suite is a case in point. Froberger would have enjoyed the gigue subject and the flat-sharp contrasts in the allemande and courante, but his parts never explore such simultaneous heights and depths as Böhm’s, nor could they manage such rushes and teases as Böhm writes in the courante and gigue. The form and the general treatment of ideas certainly come from Froberger, the first great German importer of the French dance suite for keyboard, but Böhm’s spare textures and memorable turns of phrase mark out his suites, not only from the source, but also from the dozens of contemporary imitations that can be found in the manuscripts and prints of the period. The only composer of that generation who at times matches Böhm’s invention is J. C. F. Fischer, and he takes far fewer risks. Gerber put in fairly in his lexicon of 1812: “Not only was Georg Böhm an accomplished organist, but his taste must have been formed after the music of greater writers. He treats melodies and subsidiary voices so fluently and agreeably that his work stands out in high relief from the stiff and uningratiating routine production of his time". If the beautiful and little known E flat suite represents Böhm's contribution to keyboard music in the French style, the D major Capriccio shows his indebtedness to Italy, again through the Germanizing influence of Froberger, who had studied with Frescobaldi in Rome between 1637 and 1641 and modelled his contrapuntal writing on that of the great organist of St. Peter’s. In 1624 Frescobaldi had published a collection of twelve capricci, intending them to be a kind of handbook of contrapuntal variation in a less strict imitative style than that called for by the ricercar or the fantasia: such subjects as the ascending and descending hexachord, short snatches of popular song, suspension and discord, even the two-note ostinato of the cuckoo, are taken and woven into brilliant fugal compositions, full of invention and wit. Böhm’s little capriccio is on a more modest scale, but nonetheless perfectly shaped and controlled. Following Froberger, Böhm reduces Frescobaldi’s numerous small sections to just three, rounds off each section with a free cadenza and, by means of rhythmic and chromatic alteration, turns his simple though, attractive subject into a tour de force of virtuoso excitement. Finally, in his remaining work recorded here, the Praeludium, Fuga and Postludium, Böhm ventures out without the helping hand of Froberger and creates a masterpiece that has no equal anywhere in harpsichord literature. A French operatic chaconne as prelude to a fugue would be innovation enough, but Böhm seems not content with this one act of pioneering: he follows his fugue with an inspired chain of falling sevenths, interrupted by dramatic silences, before bringing the music to rest easily and quietly in the home key of G minor. The prelude and fugue breathe fire and solemnity, but the third part is utter magic, joy alike to audience and performer; surely it is some such happily remembered and transformed improvisation at the keyboard that lies behind an even greater work, Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy. The collections from which the pieces by Kuhnau and Pachelbel come were published within a couple of years of each other, the Biblical Sonatas in 1700 and the Hexachordum Apollinis in 1699. Kuhnau is Bach’s most famous forerunner, in the limited sense that he preceded Bach as Cantor in the Leipzig Thomaskirche, but his rich and varied talents as mathematician, lawyer, linguist and philosopher are nowadays as forgotten as his music (Matthew Locke and Henry Purcell offer a strangely exact parallel). Yet Scheibe ranked Kuhnau with Keiser, Telemann and Handel as one of the four greatest German composers of the time, while Bach and Handel showe their tacit esteem by studying his music and taking ideas from it for their own use. The six Biblical stories are attractive examples of Kuhnau’s imagination and piety; the sometimes rather naive musical devices used to illustrate the text come from the same tradition as Bach’s postilions and thunderstorms. The fourth History portrays the mortal illness of Hezekiah and Isaiah’s message: Thou shalt die and not live, Hezekiah‘s prayers, the reversal of the verdict and Hezekiah’s joy at his recovery. Kuhnau employs the Lutheran hymn, Ach, Gott, mich armen Sünden to represent Hezekiah’s suffering and sets a triple version of the same tune to translate the proportional gift of fifteen years life for the ten lost sundial hours; between these to settings comes a little episode whose melodic inversion suggests the shadows running backwards, and momentary sadness breaks into the gaiety of Hezekiah’s final dance, as the king remembers his former sickness. No such elaborate programme underlies the lovely variations by the Nuremburg organist, Johann Pachelbel, the oldest of the composers on the record. Written throughout in two or three parts, these six charming little pieces definitely give the lie to Gerber’s somewhat sweeping judgment. Pachelbel’s variations and the Böhm capriccio belong to that large body of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century keyboard music that suits both organ and harpsichord; the same can be said also of the Fantasia and Fugue in A minor, BWV 904, although the work is perhaps more often chosen for recital by organists. The five-part writing at the opening and close of the fantasia sounds equally impressive on either instrument and an Italianate harpsichord such as the one used for this recording gains in clarity what it loses in grandeur to full organ in the first subject of the double fugue. Later on, at the entry of the second fugue, the sharp tonal decay of the harpsichord provides the ideal match for Bach’s haunting chromaticism, where the organ runs the risk of sounding hard and unyielding. Players of both instruments, however, should be  persuaded to take more delight in this magnificent work, one of Bach’s greatest ‘hidden’ masterpieces. Colin Tilney, 1980 A Note on the Instrument The harpsichord used for this recording is a precise replica of an instrument now in the Courtauld Institute, London. The maker is unknown, and at present it is uncertain where and when it was built, but details of the design and construction and the style of the unusually elaborate decoration associate it with Austria or South Germany in the last quarter of the seventeeth century. Unusually, it has a compass of five octaves, FF- F3 without FF sharp. The whole interior and keywell is covered with marquetry and outlined with ‘flammleisten’. The soundboard is of cypress wood containing a ‘rose’ which is in the form of a sixpointed star made of pierced wood and leather. The instrument was intended for an outer case, and the original has been rohousod at least once in its history. In the same way as German-speaking areas often borrowed their forms of music from other countries, particularly Italy and France, so also the types of musical instruments were at first imitated, then with great variety adapted and elaborated. Apart from some Germanic variations, this harpsichord conforms with the type that for convenience we usually call Italian: short-scaled, brass-strung, and with two unison registers. Other versions of this approach to harpsichord design are found in nearly all the European schools of building. Their intimate and "vocal" timbre, less obviously rich than steelstrung instruments, and the precise enunciation of their actions were an important influence on keyboard music written outside of Italy. A specifically German feature of this harpsichord is the separation of the two registers to exaggerate the difference in tone quality between them, so that used alone each has an exotic and unusual effect, the one nearer the player tending towards the nasal, the other more veiled and flutey. Each register is divided at b’/b flat’, allowing the treble of one to be used with the bass of the other (this effect can be heard in the Pachelbel). Christopher Nobbs
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"