Having completed his years-long traversal through the vocal music of Johann Sebastian Bach for Challenge Classics, Ton Koopman picks up the thread with a valuable new series surveying the complete works of Bach's Danish predecessor Dietrich Buxtehude. While Buxtehude's total output for organ has already been surveyed, albeit infrequently, on record, there are still many works falling outside that genre that have never been committed to vinyl or disc, so this is potentially a highly valuable project. It's off to an excellent start with this first volume, Harpsichord Works I -- there was a previous edition underway for PGM with harpsichordist Gavin Black, but that was stranded at one disc when the over-ambitious PGM went under. Harpsichord Works I brings us a selection Buxtehude's harpsichord suites and variation sets, and to realize them Koopman utilizes two keyboards, reconstructions of a Ruckers and a Giusti, tuned to Meantone temperament. They sound only slightly different from one another, and it does help to vary the sound of the overall program somewhat, though Buxtehude's harpsichord music contains an amazing amount of variety and imagination and could've come across just as well on a single instrument. It is a pity that much of Buxtehude's work in this genre is lost; one more disc in this series ought to cover what's left. Koopman, as one can imagine, sounds terrific in all of the music here; his natural flair for Bach and for the music of this period in general makes these Buxtehude pieces sound effortless, even though they are clearly not so. The recording is just about perfect; clean and well balanced, with good, if brief notes in three languages. The only complaint is that the variation sets are divided up by one variation per track, which means that disc one has six works divvied up into 57 tracks and the second nine into 46; for those at home this won't make any difference, but it will drive radio programmers crazy.
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