This recording by British-trained Turkish pianist
Toros Can seems at first listen to fall into an emerging classification of Baroque keyboard discs that gleefully disregard the historical performance movement and take you back to the world of arch-Romantic performances, using the full resources of the piano to illuminate Baroque harmonic art. (Hear the Rameau disc by
Tzimon Barto for an example of how extreme it can get.) Really, though,
Can does not go that far in his performances of Henry Purcell's unfailingly ingenious keyboard suites and pieces based on grounds. He seems to try to steer a middle course, keeping the rhythms going in fairly straight lines and holding to a certain mechanical relationship between melody and accompaniment. The most "Romantic" aspect of his performance is his use of the pedals, which may strike many listeners as excessive. He aims in quieter pieces for a sound that's fleeting and airy without sounding like Schumann, and places, as in the Almand of the Suite No. 7 in D minor, Z. 668 (track 14), or the concluding Saraband of the Suite No. 4 in A minor, Z. 663 (track 21), he pulls it off. The faster dances are not so successful -- the hornpipe in the same suite totally loses its hornpipe quality -- and you may feel
Can adds something to the sequence of movements that wasn't in there in the first place and distracts you from the music.
Can's interpretations aren't Romantic so much as those of a contemporary music specialist turning to the Baroque -- he writes in the notes about the "lonely times" he experienced at the Royal College of Music while studying the likes of Ligeti and
Stockhausen, and the up-close harshness of the sound also comes from this world. They do hang together as a whole, and for listeners who believe there's no sense dealing with harpsichords now that the piano has been invented, they're worth checking out; reactions to this Purcell, hanging somewhere between edgy and mystical, may well be entirely subjective.