by Eleonora Beck as published in the IAWM Journal, February 1997, pp. 37.
Barbara Harbach, harpsichord. Hester Park, CD 7702.
Virgil Thomson once compared Wanda Landowska playing Bach to a needle shower. Listening to Barbara Harbach play the harpsichord music of two eighteenth-century English composers, Elisabetta de Gambarini and Elizabeth Hardin, is like taking a hot bubble bath. Harbach plays their music with all the care of a performer in love with the material rather than in awe of it.
The CD is divided into two parts. The first consists of Six Sonatas by Gambarini (1731-1765), whom Harbach, Professor of Music at Washington State University and founder and editor of Women of Note Quarterly, describes in comprehensive program notes, as "composer, soprano and orchestra conductor" who published three volumes of keyboard music. These pieces are a cross between Scarlatti sonatas and Bach suites: collections of elegant, thinly-textured, binary form movements interspersed with lively gigues. Strikingly unembellished, they move smoothly in time without the fits and starts of, for example, the suites of Couperin. My favorite selection is Sonata II in D major, whose second movement, in delicious thirds, mimics the sounds of the hunt.
The second half of the CD is dedicated to the music of Elizabeth Hardin (fl. 1770s). An organist at London's St. Peter-le-Poor, her Six Lessons (a rough English equivalent of the Suite) for the Harpsichord appeared in 1770. These pieces are rich with the air of the Classical period, particularly in their use of Alberti basses and square melodies. The Allegro movements have the energy of Mozart's serenades, and the sequential passages move smoothly from section to section. As a whole, they are delightful.
Harbach's playing is steady throughout the collection: her notes are courteously presented, her dedication to the newly discovered manuscripts, unwavering. She is a master of subtlety. Cadences are prepared with scrutiny and repeats are performed without remorse. The music never dulls or becomes trite under her touch. This is a wonderful addition to any collection, offering a brief glimpse into the British musical household and the comforts of everyday life.
Eleonora Beck is Assistant Professor of Music at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. She has published pieces on Meredith Monk and Italian composer Fiorenza Gilioli. Her new book, Singing in the Garden: Music and Culture in the Tuscan Trecento, will appear soon.