Search - Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Budapest Concerto Armonico, Miklós Spányi :: C.P.E. Bach: Complete Keyboard Concertos, Vol. 10

So so clavicho

Fernand Raynaud | California, USA | 01/01/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I'm enormously gratified to see that someone put out a multi-volume set with such a specific and devoted focus, and I thus hesitate to be completely honest. Let me preface this by saying "I may be entirely too harsh" and "You might like it a lot".



Sorry to say, for me, there is just nothing terribly exciting about this CD. The instrument itself, which we are told was specially built for these sessions, would need a better engineering treatment to come across. Each clavichord is more tricky than the next to record well. It's a very complex sound that is normally heard at very close range, and varies with the angle of the listener's head. It doesn't fare well recorded to 2 track with conventional classical mic'ing. Recording engineers seldom deal with such an instrument, so most record it badly. No wonder so many clavichord CD liner notes exhort to play at low volume, having already forced ones' hand by mastering the CD at a ridiculously low level, as was the case here. In this instance the instrument peeks out from the noise floor dry as a sauna, yet paradoxically also rings too much, and could clearly use the mics positioned differently.



The clavichord is an instrument used for centuries as a personal tool of improvisation, practice and composition. It is most of all heard, and meant to be heard, by the player, not by some abstract audience 20 or more feet away. Such audiences have never existed. The recording engineer who doesn't know this places microphones as if recording a harpsichord, and considers this a "realistic" rendering, though it isn't. The reverberation and the sound of the sympathetically resonating strings then further cloud the sound, producing a tiresome wall of buzz. Where the recording takes advantage of close-mic'ing and multi-track techniques, a completely different timbre emerges, one that is rich, clear, expressive and forceful, which is the sound that every clavichord player knows and loves. In the pursuit of the "natural", the vast majority of clavichord recordings has completely failed, and this one is no exception.



In addition, to play this extremely sensitive instrument in such a "wooden" manner is a crime. It's as if the pursuit of historical accuracy unconsciously catered to the notion that the music of past eras was created by humans more "primitive" than contemporary man, a bit closer to cave dwellers, and with a narrower range of affect. And thus the music of CPE Bach, that unquestioned champion of the most emotional approach to this most expressive of instruments, who even wrote entire treatises on the importance of heart-wrenching performance, comes across as a cardboard cutout. I suppose it's arguably a matter of taste, so let me be specific. The most obvious problem is Mr Spanyi's left hand, which insists on playing everything piano staccato mechanico, as if there were rests between all the notes, and as if they came off a sequencer. Every piece that starts out with the right hand promises better, and then Miklos' prosthetic left hand comes in plunking and quickly puts that delusion to rest. Where all other measures haven't yet fully realized their funereal objective, THAT's a sure way to make a clavichord sound bad. Cantabile, Signore, Cantabile! Without adequate pressure the notes are poorly formed. Combine these features with CPE Bach's music, which takes a lot of extrapolation, rubato and interpretation to bring to life -- let's face it, strictly as notated, Johann Sebastian's it is NOT -- and you have a rather dry affair. I don't know the other disks in this series, but after this one, I'm not likely to. With this multi-volume undertaking consuming so much of the CPE Bach "bandwidth", it may be some time before we have access to much of his music performed with feeling on his favorite instrument."