Augustan Elegance
S it merely the novelty of the instrument or is it the bite and crispness of its tone which makes harpsichord music so refreshing? I like to believe it is the latter. As I listened to a delightful recital from 1YA_ recently,
when Layton Ring Played Couperin and Scarlatti on the harpsichord and Constance Manning sang Purcell, part of the pleasure certainly came from my sense of ‘the absolute rightness of the instrument for the music, and from the vision of the polish and grace of 18th Century
culture which was conjured up by the plucking jacks. Couperin’s "Dominos," with its baroque ornamentation, witty fancy and urbane gaiety, might have been a musical commentary on Pope’s Rape of the Lock, and the delicate taste of the Scarlatti sonatas showed how Italy as well as France shared in the sophisticated elegance of the age. Not romanticized by the piano, but formal, brittle and metallic, the neat, almost impersonal, patterns of sound symbolized for me a time whose unity of spirit contrasts sharply with the disorder of an age which expressed itself later in the same evening through the doleful sentimentality of children’s choirs, the inanity of "hit parades" and the synthetic nostalgia of "Music for Romance."
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 10
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207Augustan Elegance New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 530, 19 August 1949, Page 10
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