Special offer. Skip Sempé - A French Collection
Skip Sempé (harpsichord)
Skempé's evocation of this sound world is unsurpassed. His inventiveness is immense and vibrant, encompassing extreme tempos, aching lyricism, and delicate hesitations. On this disc his performing...
Special offer. Skip Sempé - A French Collection
Skip Sempé (harpsichord)
Purchase product
Skempé's evocation of this sound world is unsurpassed. His inventiveness is immense and vibrant, encompassing extreme tempos, aching lyricism, and delicate hesitations. On this disc his performing...
About
This volume, the third in a series dedicated to French Music, is a selection from the huge roduction of those composers, living in the shadow of Rameau: all great teachers, virtuoso performers and composers. Skip Sempé has taken the most wonderful pieces, re-creating a real concert of Parisian Musique de Salon. Rameau was the model for this generation of harpsichord players, but hearing this disc reminds us that Rameau's contemporaries were also outstanding harpsichordists. The next great flowering of keyboard music in France was to be the music and playing of Chopin, who can rightly be considered the last keyboard composer-performer of the great French salon tradition. Playing on the superb harpsichord by Bruce Kennedy based on 18th century French originals, Skip Sempé is the ideal guide for this voyage into the extraordinary diversity of French harpsichord music from the Age of the Enlightenment.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
April 2009
Skempé's evocation of this sound world is unsurpassed. His inventiveness is immense and vibrant, encompassing extreme tempos, aching lyricism, and delicate hesitations. On this disc his performing genius culminates in the show-stopping Marches des scythes... The intensity of Skempé's delivery leaves this listener breathless.
September 2009
French flamboyance and virtuosity on a disc you'll want to hear again and again. This is music that is strongly made, characterful, inventive and gloriously sonorous, especially on the Bruce Kennedy French-style instrument that Sempé touches so expertly here... This is a harpsichord release to treasure and play over and again.
22nd March 2009
Skip Sempé presents an eminently stylish recital of what he calls Parisian salon repertoire — single movements composed by some of the best of that large army of French claveciniste-composers of the 18th century. The hallmark is exuberant variety, manifest in virtuosic character pieces by Louis Marchand, Jacques Duphly, Armand-Louis Couperin, Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, Michel Corrette and Joseph-Nicolas-Pancrace Royer. Much is made, in the liner notes, of what Sempé calls the sans souci effect — the improvisatory freedom he allows himself in terms of rhythm, ornament, noncoincidence of hands, pauses and so on. The result is music-making that mixes elegance with a wonderful immediacy.
