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Special offer. Melancholy Grace
Jean Rondeau (harpsichord)
Awards:
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Presto Editor's Choice, May 2021
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Gramophone Magazine, July 2021, Editor's Choice
superb voicing and clarity of sound. Most pieces are sombre in tone, which Rondeau delivers with a well-judged pinch of melancholy.
Special offer. Melancholy Grace
Jean Rondeau (harpsichord)
Purchase product
Awards:
-
Presto Editor's Choice, May 2021
-
Gramophone Magazine, July 2021, Editor's Choice
superb voicing and clarity of sound. Most pieces are sombre in tone, which Rondeau delivers with a well-judged pinch of melancholy.
About
Melancholy Grace is a poetic collection of keyboard music from the 16th and 17th centuries by composers from Italy, the Netherlands, England and Germany, including Frescobaldi, Luigi Rossi, Picchi, Luzzaschi, Sweelinck, Dowland, Bull and Gibbons. The French harpsichordist Jean Rondeau has conceived the album as a sombre, but eloquent dialogue between two contrasting voices: melancholy conveyed through chromaticism and melancholy conveyed through the musical expression of tears and weeping. Each voice finds expression through a different instrument: a 16th century Italian virginal (a compact harpsichord) for the ‘tears’ and a modern replica of an 18th century harpsichord for the ‘chromatic’ pieces.
Contents and tracklist
Spotlight on this release
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Awards and reviews
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Presto Editor's ChoiceMay 2021
-
Gramophone MagazineJuly 2021Editor's Choice
September 2021
superb voicing and clarity of sound. Most pieces are sombre in tone, which Rondeau delivers with a well-judged pinch of melancholy.
July 2021
[A] sense of breath and space pervades the album, and coming in at over 80 minutes, it’s shed the feeling that it’s a recording at all: Rondeau presents something closer to meditation.
May 2021
Rondeau’s cosmopolitan Anatomy of Melancholy has all the pathos and elegance which the title suggests - but there’s fire in the belly too, notably in the rumbustious Picchi dances and the majestic account of Sweelinck’s large-scale Fantasia Chromatica, where he summons an almost organ-like range of sonorities from his modern replica of an eighteenth-century Italian harpsichord.
