J. S. Bach:
Italian Concerto

Terence Charlston - harpsichord

Playing time: 75 mins.

£11.99 * / $18.50
Free Delivery Worldwide
All major currencies
* subject to current exchange rates

The Observer, CD of the Week

Beecham may have likened the sound of the harpsichord to a skeleton copulating on a tin roof but 200 years earlier, Bach had no alternative. This collection of Italian-inspired forms and styles, from the early Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue to the great Italian Concerto spans Bach's Cothen and Leipzip periods. Charlston plays with flair and naturally expressive timing and, as occasioned in the early Aria Variata BWV 989, with touching serenity. With a recordin that finely captures the instrument's bite while avoiding thundering mechanical noise, even Beecham might have approved.
Edward Bhesania.

Early Music Review Feb, 2002

This is Terence Charlston's second recording of Sebastian Bach's solo keyboard music for Deux-Elles, and to me it has formed a highly impressive introduction on CD. This is no easy programme, for in it the famous masterpieces which challenge any good player are heard beside less attention-seeking works like the fine, early, multi-sectional Toccata in D, BWV 912, the Aria Variata 'in the Italian style' (but the French manner) and the Prelude and Fughetta in G, BWV 902. All are very musically shaped and delivered by one who obviously knows well how to make the best use of a realy sensitively-weighted actioned and amplified harpsichord copy. I have been drawn by the completely persuasive playing of the music into placing it immediately among my most favoured Bach harpsichord discs.
Stephen Daw.

Classical London

[Peter Grahame Woolf compares Terence Charlston's harpsichord CD release on Deux-Elles (DXL1017) with a recent offering from Angela Hewitt (piano)]

Bach's most popular work for solo keyboard scores over fifty entries in the Classical Catalogue and these two, received recently, offer a fascinating evening's listening played in tandem. Johann Sebastian was sparing with performance instructions, so there is ample scope for individual interpretation; both are recommendable.

Terence Charlston explains how the Italian musical style pervades Bach's keyboard works, even though distant travel was impossible for him and a thirst for music of other lands had to be satisfied through contact with visiting musicians and by studying scores. Charlston inaugurated the Historical Practice course as Head of Early Music in the Royal Academy of Music, and he knows everything about how to make his chosen instrument expressive, by rhythmic variety and subtle agogic treatment of key moments, even though the harpsichord lacks the piano's sustaining pedal, or the 'swell' of later organs. He is equally an emotional and a scholarly musician, and his playing will convince some collectors who prefer their Bach on the piano. The Ruckers/Howarth harpsichord, closely recorded, is welcome in the living room, with a wealth of rich jangly tone colour captured under the lid. Angela Hewitt, the leading Bach pianist of today, is unexpectedly the cooler of the two in the Italian Concerto's slow movement, and far swifter in the others. Her colouration throughout her delectable CD is delightful, but you may begin to find, as I did, that her discreet surges of 'crescendo' feel slightly gratuitous oft repeated.

There is no overlap of other works and both programmes offer ample variety (to my taste, more attractive than, say, Trevor Pinnock's deservedly award-winning Six Partitas on Hanssler Bachakademie Edn.115). Charlston has the Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue, and the highly ornamented Aria which became famous as the theme of the Goldberg Variations, and both programmes contain rarer music.

Also recommended, a recital of 18th Century French harpsichord music by Terence Charlston (Deux-Elles DXL 917).
Peter Grahame Woolf.