Jones, R.: Harpsichord Suites Nos. 1, 3 and 5

Chronique

Richard Jones was the leader of the Drury Lane orchestra in an era of British music dominated by George Frideric Handel and an influx of Italian musicians. The year after Jones died in 1744, Thomas Arne presented "God Save the King" at Drury Lane, establishing once and for all that England needed English musicians able to serve her interests in a way foreigners could not. Jones' presumably early death -- his birthdate is not known -- prevented him from taking part in the revolution that occurred afterward among English musicians such as Arne, Boyce, Bond, Avison, and others. Jones also suffers from being tremendously obscure -- even though the first modern reprint of his 1732 Suits or Setts of Lessons for the Harpsichord appeared in 1974, this 2006 Hungaraton recording of Richard Jones: Suites for Harpsichord by Hungarian musicologist and harpsichordist Judit Péteri appears to be the first. It features the First, Third, and Fifth suites from Jones' set of six suites, which -- outside of a further set of violin sonatas, a single cantata, and fragments of an opera, is all we have of Jones' music. These suites do not sound anything like Handel -- the prelude to the Third Suite in B flat is a third as long as the whole suite, and it moves through a lot of ideas in an almost freely associated manner. Jones' eccentricity and independence of mind are reminiscent of the thinking, if not the style, of earlier English composers such as Matthew Locke. There are two toccatas in the first suite, the second of which is particularly sticky and stubborn in its use of repeated notes within a limited range. Difficult, wide leaps abound in this music, reflecting Jones' work as a violinist, the instrument he played in the pit at Drury Lane. Although hardly any of Jones' operatic music survives, he did compose quite a bit of opera and some of the shorter pieces sound like reductions of orchestral dances written for ballets or other short operatic to-dos; the sixth suite, not represented here, was certainly that as it consists of 12 (!) movements. Jones was aware of, and to some extent imitated, the Italianate music most common to the London of his day, but his work represents a kind of scrambling of Italian influences. Péteri plays the faster movements at a very even tempo throughout, with an equal sense of touch, and this generally works, as much of this music is fast. However, her approach in the slower movements is very similar, and one would not have minded a bit more exploration of the possibility of expressiveness in movements such as the Largo from the Third Suite. The instrument in use is a modern one designed after Flemish models; it is quite loud and Hungaraton's recording is likewise bright. Nevertheless, the disc does the job of transmitting this weird and unexpected sidebar drawn from the corpus of English harpsichord music; a second disc containing the remaining suites would certainly be welcome.
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