Kenneth Gilbert (harpsichord) Champion de Chambonnières, Livre premier de clavecin

[@philipkimber4403]

Very special music played by someone who understands. (There are too many unmusical "musicians"). This is true early harpsichord music, moving - and precise. I`ve been playing Chambonnièrres all evening and am happy to have rediscovered this jewel. Thanks to whoever posted it.

[@pauloludwig7672]

Nestas horas o Google é brilhante! Um jeito suave de sublimar a Alma!

[@luisinhomiranda5058]

Excellent

[@philipkimber4403]

I equally love this performer's work and the composer.

[@christopherswainson371]

Wonderful, thank you, didn't he play with superbly crafted ornaments.

[@ermogene6985]

Thank you so much for uploading a jewel like this, impossible to find nowadays!!

[@paulcaswell2813]

Lovely to hear this again - I owned the original LP. Like being reunited with an old friend. Many thanks for the upload.

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

And that old friend can be visited from everywhere as long as you have an internet connection. I was working alone this afternoon at the office so I could pick my own recording alas not the quality of the speakers and soundcard I am used to at home but still very enjoyable.

[@_PROCLUS]

Kenneth Gilbert 1931 - 2020 Canadian harpsichordist, organist, musicologist, and music educator. Gilbert studied at the Conservatoire de musique du Québec à Montréal under Yvonne Hubert (piano) and Gabriel Cusson (harmony and counterpoint). He also studied the organ privately with Conrad Letendre in Montréal. In 1953 he won the Prix d'Europe for organ performance, an award which enabled him to pursue studies in Paris, France with Nadia Boulanger (composition), Maurice Duruflé (organ), Ruggero Gerlin (harpsichord), Gaston Litaize (organ), and Sylvie Spicket (harpsichord) from 1953-1955. He later studied the harpsichord privately under Wanda Landowska.

[@ilumalucwile2422]

Thank you so much for uploading. I've been fascinated by his music since reading Wilfred Mellers' book on François Couperin as a teenager.

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

Before it slips into oblivion. I never have seen this recording as a cd-release unfortunately.

[@_PROCLUS]

💝💝💝 Wonderful music, played so beautifully ... Thanks a lot for the great upload, as ever ..

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

Yes Kenneth Gilbert is one of my favourites too, perhaps because I learned to appreciate the harpsichord as an instrument in my youth with the four books of François Couperin. An endless stream of music and with the cassette deck I selected the 'most appealing' (read fastest) pièces. I did not appreciate the full extend of his playing yet but I learned his vocabulary very well that way. Such a nice articulation and phrasing.

[@_PROCLUS]

@@HarpsichordVinylGallery 🌹

[@tumanmisty1767]

Folies Espagne, You re really the TOP of BEST maniacs on harpsichords, period composers, period instruments, phenomenal expression, detailing zooming, impressive infinitely aesthetic, aristocratic manners, information, dimensionality of Divinity 'till Absolute! Take all My Bottomed Amazement, Admiration Highest, Respect, Astonishment, & Consideration.

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

Don't overestimate it. It is just my personal joy to study at least every week one of my vinyls I have not heard for a long time. It is a bonus to make this wonderful music available for the happy few and expressing my deep admiration for these wonderful performers in the past we seem to forget far too soon.

[@TheGloryofMusic]

@@HarpsichordVinylGallery On your site you mention a radio station that broadcasts live harpsichord recitals. Where I'm at the classical station never plays solo organ or harpsichord music. Apparently there is a fear that early keyboard instruments will drive away the audience. A while ago the station played the L. Couperin Pavane, but on the piano! But this distorts the music, which depends critically on meantone temperament.

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

@@TheGloryofMusic I guess you mean the Concertzender. It has a website. It is a unique broadcaster. So I was August the 12th in the Goethe Instituut in Amsterdam where Mario Sarrechia played a program on a Mother and Child virginal. And when I looked in November at the Concertzender (look for live and early music) I found out that that concert, which had only 200 people as an audience, was broadcasted by the concertzender www.concertzender.nl/mario-sarrechia-en-apollo-ensemble-live/ So it is not non-stop hpschd-music but for the small audience they do broadcast live performances like the A&A-Cembalo-duo www.concertzender.nl/programma/concertzender_live_526454/ So you have to do some searches to find these jewels once in a while.

[@InMaLa]

The D major jig be so wistful

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

The rest of the documentation by Davitt Moroney 1/2 Jacques Champion (who took the name Chambonnieres from his mother's father, who took it from the region in France ' in which he lived) was admirably suited to be the composer who first successfully adapted the wonderful subtleties of the lute to the harpsichord since there had been distinguished harpsiGhordists and lutenists in his family. His father, Jacques Champion the elder, was also famed for the beauty of his touch on the harpsichord, and his father's mother had been the daughter of the Scottish lutenist Edinthon, a celebrated player at the Valois court. IChambonnieres' father became a royal harpsichordist in Paris; he died in his mid-eighties in about 1640, but the young Chambonnieres had already taken over some of his duties in 1638.) Despite these duties at Court, he liked frequently to return to his native countryside of Chambonnieres, at Plessis-feu·Ausoult, and it was there in the early 1650s that he first met the young Couperin brothers, Louis, Fran90is the elder, and Charles. His recognition of the talent of Louis Couperin, in' particular, resulted in their becoming his pupils and being introduced to the Court. By this time, Chambonnieres' reputation had spread all over Europe, and las he himself says, without exaggeration, in the preface to his harpsichord pieces) his music was known "by the most eminent people in Europe ... in .almost every. city in the world where the harpsichord is ' understood." In the early 1660s he seems to have fallen under an official shadow at Court, the exact cause of which is unclear. The shadow' never lifted. The publication of his harpsichord music in 1670 was evidently an att~mpt on his part to preserve his 'best work before he died. Two volumes appeared together, containing eleven suites of which the five heard on this record comprise the first b·ook. Each book . contains 30 movements, .but there survive in manuscripts nearly 100 additional pieces, which he would perhaps also have published had he lived longer. His remarkable two-volumed publication was the first

[@frenchiecocorico1]

Louis , François the elder and Charles II were first the pupils of their father Charles I who was organist at Saint Pierre - Saint Paul Abbey in Chaumes en Brie. There was no miracle in this Couperin family 's story

[@freetime2006]

a pleasure to have, especially in these times: but, more generally and not to put too fine a point on it, the whole project is itself a public service.

[@HarpsichordVinylGallery]

The rest of the documentation by Davitt Moroney 2/2 such col lection of engraved keyboard music issued in France, and it inaugurated a long line of magnificent volumes of Pieces de Clavecin over the next 100 years. His German contemporary, Froberger, is generally credited with having given to the French-style keyboard suite the distinctive sequence of allemande, courante, sarabande, gigue. Mersenne's comment shows that ChambonniEnes was famous when Froberger was still a teenager. We know moreover that when Froberger visited Paris he wanted copies of Chambonnieres: music; furthermor.e, the sequence of movements in Froberger's suites was sometimes different in his own lifetime Ithe gigue could come second, and the suite could end with a not-too-slow sarabande). All these factors indicate that the Frenchman Chambonnieres deserves more credit than he usually gets for the format of the nascent French suite. The French composers who published music in the thirty or. forty years after his death almost certainly knew more of his music than they knew of Froberger's, and many of them h,ad been his pupils. Despite the variety found in Chambonnieres' suites, there is usually a slow, quadruple-beat first movement loften an allemande but sometimes a pavanne) and there are usually two or three .courantes and a sarabande. IFive of the eleven published suites' also have a gigue.) Very occasionally there is a piece with a more descriptive title, such as the fine pavanne L 'Entretien des Dieux which is probably a tribute to the virtuoso lutenist Denis Gaultier who publis'hed a collection entitled La Rhetorique des Dieux. IWas ' Rameau thinking of these two great c.omposers when he wrote his L 'Entretien des Muses?) Chambonnieres' sensitivity to the harpsichord was of course dependent l!Pon the precise sounds which he heard when he played his instrument. It follows that his music can only be understood, and its real origi nality and beauty appreciated, when it is played on a 17thcentury French harpsichord. These are now extremely' rare indeed, and those in good playing condition are even' rarer. Davitt Moroney

[@tumanmisty1767]

О, such a splendor, divine completeness pleasured by deep real knowledge, Folies Espagne! Charming Exhaustiveness, am fascinated!