Books, Arts & Manners: Bach & Mozart, Beethoven & Boyce

`The sound of the harpsichord?” Sir Thomas Beecham once remarked. “Two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.” He could be jocose because he was never forced to play what I have always considered the Devil’s own instrument. And such it might have remained had not Johann Sebastian Bach yanked it out of the shadows. It is an instrument without conscience, for it gives the performer neither dynamics nor sostenuto and compels inordinate ornamentation.

Yet the power and inventiveness of Bach’s harpsichord partitas cannot be gainsaid—scores so wedded to their instrument that they are gutted when translated to the concert grand. Few who perform them, however, fully come to grips with the harpsichord’s devilry. Beecham’s copulating skeletons take over—or, worse still, it sounds as if the keyboard were made of eggshells. Hence it was with a small measure of dread that I placed on the compact-disc turntable Paul Badura-Skoda’s recording of the six partitas of Bach’s Clavier Übung I (Astrée E7771, distributed by Harmonía Mundi U.S.A., 3364 South Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90034).

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Ralph de Toledano

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`The sound of the harpsichord?” Sir Thomas Beecham once remarked. “Two skeletons copulating on a tin roof.” He could be jocose because he was never forced to play what I have always considered the Devil’s own instrument. And such it might have remained had not Johann Sebastian Bach yanked it out of the shadows. It is an instrument without conscience, for it gives the performer neither dynamics nor sostenuto and compels inordinate ornamentation.

Yet the power and inventiveness of Bach’s harpsichord partitas cannot be gainsaid—scores so wedded to their instrument that they are gutted when translated to the concert grand. Few who perform them, however, fully come to grips with the harpsichord’s devilry. Beecham’s copulating skeletons take over—or, worse still, it sounds as if the keyboard were made of eggshells. Hence it was with a small measure of dread that I placed on the compact-disc turntable Paul Badura-Skoda’s recording of the six partitas of Bach’s Clavier Übung I (Astrée E7771, distributed by Harmonía Mundi U.S.A., 3364 South Robertson Boulevard, Los Angeles, Calif. 90034).