Intavolatura di cimbalo

Album review

Throughout this first album, harpsichordist Yannn Moulin (a disciple of Olivier Beaumont, Kenneth Weiss, Pierre Hantaï, Skip Sempé and Blandine Verlet - a group with a range of knowledge and experience of immense breadth and depth), offers us the chance to discover the richness and diversity of the languages that Frescobaldi mastered over the course of his life's work. He has chosen two quite different instruments: a harpsichord inspired by the Italian design, created by Philippe Humeau in 2012, and a virginal from Jean-François Brun, a direct copy of an unsigned Italian instrument from 1626. In terms of the Humeau harpsichord, the manufacturer himself explains that this is by no means a simple copy, but a wholly modern work, a sort of pure extrapolation, based on some typically Italian traditions but above all a work of his own imagination - fed by forty years of experience in the field! In this extravagant music, light and dark alternate, with lively and cheery dances, while the composer is developing an ever-more chromatic, ever-more dissonant language, with an evocative power which keeps the listener hooked, as they lose themselves in harmonic meanders which are full of surprises for contemporary Romans, Tuscans and Florentines. Yoann Moulin's performance does full justice to this feast. © SM/Qobuz