Frescobaldi & Buxtehude: Works for Organ & Harpsichord

Buxtehude, Dietrich, Frescobaldi, Girolamo

Guglielmi, Luca

CPO 777 930-2

Luca Guglielmi is not only a conductor and composer but also an outstanding harpsichordist and organist, and on this cpo release featuring selected works for organ and harpsichord by Frescobaldi and Buxtehude he convincingly displays to us his capabilities as a soloist. Ever since 1993 Guglielmi has been active as a soloist on the harpsichord, organ, fortepiano, and clavichord as well as an ensemble director – along with his many other activities at home and abroad. Moreover, he is an enthusiastic teacher of harpsichord, organ, and orchestra who bases his instruction exclusively on historical documents. He himself has lent verbal expression to the artistic greatness of the two significant composers featured here: »Girolamo Frescobaldi and Dieterich Buxtehude are two figures of absolute significance in the field of the history of Western music. The first, a native of Ferrara but active principally in Rome, was the greatest organist and harpsichordist of his times, the inventor of so many playing styles (Luigi Battiferri), the genial innovator of forms, and the supreme master of the art of variation in a period during which thematicism had not yet established itself so much and maximum control of the musical material was provided by its skillful alternation and juxtaposition. In the same way, Buxtehude was a consummate keyboard artist and the director of St. Mary's Church in Lübeck, sensitive to the new developments of Italian provenance, and an enthusiastic supporter of the celebrated synthesis formed by the Italian, French, and German styles that would bear its best fruits in the Baroque Europe of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi.«

CD x 1

CPO

11/25/14

761203793020