The
Frescobaldi recordings of French (and partly Belgian-trained) keyboardist
Jean-Marc Aymes have justly been awarded major prizes in France, and they've helped unlock the difficult music of this master of the early Italian Baroque.
Frescobaldi's music can seem like a mass of undifferentiated, dense polyphony, but in
Aymes' hands the factors that made it exciting and novel in its own time emerge. Earlier
Aymes releases have examined
Frescobaldi's later works, but here he takes on the publication that made his name as a keyboard composer and did much to define the expressive dimension of Baroque keyboard music as a whole: the Toccate e partite d'intavolatura di cimbalo, libro primo (Toccatas and Partitas Intabulated for the Keyboard, Book One), for short. The collection consists of quasi-improvisatory pieces called toccatas that are distant ancestors of
Bach's works in the form, "partitas," which are somewhere between variations and ground-bass pieces, and various other works; the two CDs also included works that were added when the collection was republished in 1637.
Aymes, then, devotes himself, here and elsewhere, to a single publication, but he doesn't plow through it in order. Instead, as
Frescobaldi himself or a purchaser of his time would certainly have done, he rearranges the works to form local contrasts between them and bring out their moods. He also switches off among a harpsichord and a small organ. It doesn't seem as though
Aymes thinks certain pieces are more appropriate for performance on the organ, but rather that he is trying in another way to freshen the listener's ears. Recommended especially for francophones; booklet notes are in French only. They also include
Frescobaldi's own lengthy Italian preface to the music, also translated into French.