Early Keyboard Masters

Ratko, Agnes

Ágnes Ratkó invites her listeners onto an exciting journey back to the earliest solo repertoire for the harpsichord, dating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In this period, keyboard music underwent many significant changes and experienced its first ‘golden era’. The Spanish composer Antonio de Cabezón, one of the sixteenth-century’s most influential and intriguing personalities, sets the scene. His Diferencias, included in this recording, number among the first and most beautiful variations for keyboard instruments. The journey continues with John Bull and two of his so-called in nomine compositions, highly popular in their time and typical of the English style. These are followed by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck’s adaptation of the Pavana Lachrimae from John Dowland’s Lachrimae or Seven Tears, which is as movingly melancholic as it is beautiful. The journey reaches its final destination with a passacaglia by Kaspar Kerll — one of his most demanding and comprehensive works. The vibrant, sensitive approach with which Ágnes Ratkó brings to the fore the unique character of these pieces gives eloquent testimony to the claim that music which was first performed as long as 500 years ago has lost none of its profundity and continues to exert its fascination on modern listeners.

Price: $27.98