Roseingrave
Harpsichord Suites
Bridget Cunningham (harpsichord) Signum SIGCD783 106:25 mins (2 discs) At last, a generous survey of the harpsichord music of Thomas Roseingrave, Irish contemporary of Handel. Charles Burney admired him for the imaginative skill of his fugal improvisations, though regretting that, having ‘fixed his affections on a lady of no dovelike constancy’, his intellect was impaired. Be that as it may, the music on these discs reveals an invention and an expressive charm that has been unfairly overlooked.
At the heart of Bridget Cunningham’s programme lie
Roseingrave’s Eight Suites of Lessons for the Harpsichord or Spinnet, first issued by publisher John Walsh in 1728. They are works of originality, broadly adhering to the movement sequence of the traditional lute and keyboard suites of the time and in some instances, notably the Gigues, recalling Handel, whose eight harpsichord suites had been issued eight years earlier. Perhaps the composer is at his most impressive in the Allemandes and Courantes, whose harmonic palette is often distinctive and mildly adventurous. Cunningham, in her interesting essay in the booklet, describes the writing as lyrical and complex.
Readers hitherto unacquainted with Roseingrave’s keyboard music are in for a treat. Cunningham’s empathy with his myriad little eccentricities and of his art in general is abundantly on display, and further coloured by the doublemanual Ruckers-style harpsichord, sympathetically prepared by Andrew Wooderson and Edmund Pickering. The Allemande of the F minor Suite provides but one of many instances of the instrument sounding at its most alluring.
In addition to the Eight
Suites Cunningham plays four miscellaneous items of which an Allemande in B flat, and an arrangement, one of many by Roseingrave himself of a Sonata by Domenico Scarlatti, whose music he tirelessly championed and promoted, are especially rewarding. Nicholas Anderson PERFORMANCE
RECORDING