Daniel-Ben Pienaar is not the first artist to play 17th century keyboard music on the piano, but nobody has done it with quite the variety of sounds and approaches he manages here. Two CDs worth of short keyboard pieces from this era might seem a lot, but Pienaar holds the listener's interest and much more. He divides the repertory into four types, which he terms "Intimation and Imitation" (these are polyphonic pieces), "Dance," "Variation," and "Depiction and Evocation" (representational works). National styles have relevance in the music of the 17th century, but these general principles cross national boundaries, and Pienaar's program allows the listener to hear the tremendous variety of ways composers approached these basic compositional problems. Most of the music is fairly obscure, and there are some real gems, like Giovanni Maria Trabaci's highly chromatic Gagliarda Seconda, a combination of the dance and polyphonic ideas, and the extremely virtuosic Variations on "La Capricciosa" of Dietrich Buxtehude. The pieces were written for a variety of keyboard instruments, and looked at one way, the piano is a kind of compromise between them; Pienaar applies some pianistic sounds, but he's hardly a Glenn Gould. Yet he's not neutral, either. He uses the piano to bring out the expressive devices in the music, often with extraordinary effect. The piano becomes almost an investigative tool in this superb release by one of the most original pianists on the current scene.
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