The centerpiece of this collection of rather obscure Baroque harpsichord music is a group of unpublished and hitherto unrecorded pieces found in a manuscript at the Florence Conservatory of Music. It may be guessed that the author was Ferdinando de' Medici of the famed Florentine merchant family -- he was a musician -- but that conclusion isn't the done deal that the track list would imply. The Medici pieces are a mixture of quasi-improvisatory pieces that might have been intended as exercises of some kind (consider the title "Preludio di botte, acciachature, e ligature") and binary dances that are all given the title "Aria alla francese" (Air in the French Style). They are pleasant but largely unremarkable harpsichord pieces that, now discovered, perhaps provide an Italian counterpart for the output of Frederick the Great of Prussia. Here they are placed in the middle of a temporal sequence of harpsichord music going back to the late Renaissance polyphony or Giovanni de Macque, a contemporary of Frescobaldi's, and forward to a pair of fiery Spanish pieces from the end of the eighteenth century. Perhaps the highlight is a sonata by Giovanni Battista Martini, known in the history books as the Padre Martini who gave Mozart composition lessons. It is a dense, dark work, full of contrapuntal artifice and entirely out of step with the light naturalism that was flourishing in Italy at the time -- just what one would expect, in short, from a teacher of counterpoint. Finnish harpsichordist
Aapo Häkkinen has a hard-edged, dramatic, edgy sound that works well in the Martini, the Macque, and in the flashy perpetual-motion Fandango of Antonio Soler that closes the program. In the lighter dance-inflected movements of the Medici group he seems too tense; the dance rhythms get lost. The Deux-Elles label captures the distinctive sound of the seventeenth century Italian harpsichord
Häkkinen plays, and he even adjusts the tunings of the intervals as the program proceeds through time. This is a somewhat specialized disc of keyboard music, but one that is certainly of interest for libraries or for anyone bitten by the Medici bug.