Works by Fischer, Fux, JS Bach, L Couperin, Froberger, Andreas Staier
Andreas Staier (harpsichord)
Alpha Classics ALPHA1012 66:57 mins
Méditation is a thought-provoking anthology of keyboard pieces that share interrelated themes, motifs and ideas. Some of the contents are open to conjecture, but there is a basis of hard fact too, providing interesting tangents and subjective insights into 17th- and early 18th-century harpsichord repertoire.
That is not all, for the programme further includes six pieces by Staier himself. In his own words, ‘given that my concept of music has been influenced not only by Byrd, Bach and Schubert but also by the music of the 20th and 21st centuries, how could I best express and realise this in notational form?’ In keeping with the remainder of the recital, these pieces are linked by threads which refer to an ancient cantus firmus on the one hand and a specific sequence of intervals on the other. Readers are likely to be intrigued by this, even if they are not invariably convinced.
Staier begins with a Prelude and Fugue from Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s Ariadne musica, a collection which was a likely source of inspiration for Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and which forms a leitmotif in the first half of the programme. Of greater substance are Louis Couperin’s elegiac Pavane and Froberger’s Méditation sur ma mort future from which the disc borrows its title.
Staier’s own pieces are based on six chords which conceal the aforementioned cantus firmus and sequence of intervals. Following these arresting, often aurally challenging pieces he concludes with Bach’s warmly coloured E major Prelude and its Fugue from Book Two of the ‘48’, whose subject bears relationship with music by Fischer, Froberger and Fux found elsewhere in the programme.