When it came to keyboard works,
Jean-Philippe Rameau (1663-1741) had some pretty distinguished
semi-contemporaries including Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) and
Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). Bach is of course well known, and
Scarlatti's sonatas are often played by prominent pianists. But
Rameau has been pretty neglected and even I, after a lifetime of
music, would have been hard put to think of even one piece by him
that I knew.
No longer. Thanks to Vikingur
Olafsson and a new CD just out, I can join the slender Rameau fan
club. His keyboard music is memorable and quirky, far removed from
the paint-by-numbers salon music that the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries often churned out. The pièces de clavecin excerpts
in this selection are especially remarkable. Olafsson juxtaposes
short pieces by Rameau with short pieces by Debussy, an excellent
idea. Too many musicians just record and re-record the same old
Moonlight sonatas and Liszt sonatas and I welcome the introduction to
a variety of short pieces. Olafsson is an extraordinary pianist — a
sensitive musician as well as a real virtuoso — and I already sense
he is going to be my Artist of the Year even though it is not yet
April.
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