PANORAMA 1919- 2013
A Century of British Keyboard Music,
performed on the harpsichord by PENELOPE CAVE
Like the patchwork of fields seen from a plane, the British repertoire within this recording, played by Penelope Cave on the harpsichord, offers an overview of the landscape of what is sometimes referred to as music of the early keyboard revival. The individual pieces are mostly miniatures that draw, to varying degrees, on the vast body of past keyboard repertoire, and yet celebrate the harpsichord as a relevant, modern instrument. Panorama, the title of the final piece of the CD, also describes these aerial snapshots from each decade from 1919 to 2013.
Inevitably, in writing for the harpsichord or clavichord, composers look back from their own standpoint of the present, applying their knowledge, experience and imagination to the task of invigorating a compositional fusion of current international styles with tropes of the past. Many of the short pieces on this CD may only have been intended to supply a taste of a quaint instrument, or a glimpse of a bygone age; some are now historic, themselves, and ready to be re-evaluated or re-marginalised.
This recording is dedicated to a pioneer of harpsichord music of the twentieth-century, Ruth Dyson (1917-1997). The producer was Pamela Nash, who also made such an excellent job of our very own twenty-first century CD, Shadow Journey, in which Penelope Cave also contributed. PFCD048 http://ascrecords.com/primafacie/