The harpsichord as a museum piece – Justin Taylor wants to forcefully dispel this misconception with this ambitious album. And he succeeds brilliantly. Harpsichord XX has become a personal panorama of an instrument that, despite its strongly Baroque reputation, has fully found its way into twentieth-century music. Taylor structures his program around four harpsichord concertos – by Jean Françaix (1912-1997), Henryk Górecki (1933-2010), Francis Poulenc (1899-1963), and Manuel de Falla (1876-1946) – and connects them with solo pieces that serve as both resting points and contrasts. Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and Bohuslav Martinů (1890-1959), but also a world premiere by Stéphane Gassot (b.1987) and, as a cheerful finale, Maple Leaf Rag by Scott Joplin (1868-1917): the programming is inventive, coherent, and fearless.
The choice to record on a single instrument – a hybrid harpsichord from the 1970s, built by Anthony Sidey, positioned somewhere between the Pleyel tradition and historical instruments – proves particularly fruitful. The instrument boasts a broad palette of colors, from dreamy lute stops to robust sixteen-foot stops, and Taylor uses every shade with the refinement one expects from him.
The opening work – Bartók's Homage to J.S.B. from the Mikrokosmos cycle – immediately sets the tone: reverent yet clear, with Taylor allowing the music to breathe without adding unnecessary weight. Then comes Françaix's concerto, a work full of airy wit and chamber-music elegance. Françaix plays ingeniously with Baroque forms – toccatas, a minuet, a rondo-like finale – and Taylor eagerly joins in the game, ideally supported by fellow musicians such as flutist Philippe Bernold and the Quatuor Zaïde.
Stéphane Gassot's Bluesinuum, recorded here for the first time, is a compelling and audacious homage to György Ligeti's Continuum that doesn't displace that famous original but subtly positions itself alongside it, like a blues-tinted echo. You can hear that Taylor and Gassot have been friends for nearly twenty years: there's something self-evident in the way the music seems written for precisely these hands.
Górecki's harpsichord and string orchestra concerto – written for Elisabeth Chojnacka, who also undertook the premiere – undoubtedly forms the most overwhelming moment on the album. Under Chloé Dufresne's direction, the Orchestre National de Lille creates a sonic world that is simultaneously mechanical and magnetic: the first movement, Allegro molto, barrels forward like a locomotive without a final station, while the second movement, Vivace marcatissimo, explores the boundaries of rhythmic repetition. Taylor holds his own in this sonic onslaught with a concentration that commands admiration. The listener is swept along from beginning to end in an uncompromising musical roller coaster.
The Outdoor Concert by Poulenc – the great centerpiece of the album – receives a reading here that exemplarily reconciles elegance with sharpness. Under Chloé Dufresne's direction, the Orchestre National de Lille plays with a suppleness that makes this music continually breathe, while the dialogue between harpsichord and winds unfolds with an almost theatrical inevitability. Poulenc's typical blend of wit, melancholy, and irony comes fully into its own: the music smiles constantly, but never without a hint of wistfulness.
Taylor approaches the work clearly from the world of Wanda Landowska, for whom the concerto was originally written, without falling into historicizing imitation. His playing possesses precisely that combination of refinement, playfulness, and clarity that this score requires. The fact that he has studied Landowska's annotated score is moreover clearly audible in the phrasing of the slow movement, where each line breathes naturally and never becomes sentimental. In the fast passages, Taylor maintains a remarkable lightness: virtuosic, but never showy, brilliant without affectation.
De Falla's concerto, written for flute, oboe, clarinet, violin, and cello alongside harpsichord, closes the album with a light bite, playfully and sharply. De Falla's compositional approach has something deliberately awkward about it, and Taylor embraces that angularity without trying to soften it. The surrounding musicians also visibly throw themselves wholeheartedly into this capricious, rhythmically charged score.
As a surprising encore comes Scott Joplin's Maple Leaf RagMaple Leaf Rag
Harpsichord XX is not merely a thematic curiosity. It is a compelling argument, carried by a musician with knowledge, taste, and nerve. Justin Taylor convincingly demonstrates that the harpsichord still has plenty to say.
