Sweelinck: Keyboard Works, Volume 2
Robert Woolley, harpsichord/virginal
Chandos CHAN 0758
Stumbling about the Internet the other day, I discovered that you can order, online, the BMG Music Service Classical Music Club mailing list. Members are “typically affluent, cultured, well-educated men and women with a history of prompt payment.” Because they have “selected classical music as their listening type” they obviously ”appreciate the finer things in life.” I am forced to agree. After all, is there any car finer than the 1999 Honda Civic?
This is, indeed, my car. I drive it everywhere. And, during the summer, because the air conditioning died, I drive it everywhere with the windows wide open. So the continuing quest is for a soundtrack that can overcome that much road noise and still edify.
Today’s candidate: harpsichord and virginal music by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck. On the one hand, an ideal timbre — the shuddering pluck of each note even cut through the din of a passing semi-trailer. But the limited sustain meant an inverse relationship between speed and perceptible pitch: the faster I went, the more the melody and harmony disappeared, with only the snap of each note’s attack left for the ear. Once I got above 45 or so, it might as well have been a drum solo. But that revealed a characteristic of Sweelinck’s music that he normally takes some trouble to conceal: his relentless, almost disco-like rhythmic regularity.
Much of this recording is taken up with Sweelinck’s variation sets: “Mein junges Leben hat ein Endt,” probably his most famous example; the bright, showy “Esce mars”; the Allemand formerly known as “More Palatino,” so effectively ripped off by Handel; the stylized melancholy of the “Paduana Lachrymae,” etc. Sweelinck was attracted to folk-songish themes, and once you strip away pitch information, it’s easy to hear why: his modus operandi is to latch onto each theme’s rhythmic hook and never let go. No matter how much activity Sweelinck layers on top of each theme, the rhythmic profile, always of nursery-rhyme simplicity, continues to repeat, steady and unwavering. Even among the rest of the program — a handful of toccatas, the opulent “Fantasia Crommatica” — Sweelinck fashions his motives to work the same way, with a preponderance of straight eighths and marching quarter notes, looped for the duration.
Historically, such technique is hardly unusual. But hit a red light, and you hear just how good Sweelinck is: as pitch returns, the rhythmic repetition fades into a barely perceptible background with startling effect. Sweelinck is constantly misdirecting your attention from his four-square scaffold with shifting harmony, changing chords on varying beats, holding on to a harmony longer than you expect, abandoning another seemingly too soon, unleashing a flourish of virtuosity as a distraction. And yet, no matter how far afield he goes, the regular tick of his rhythmic track brings everything back home right on time.
Woolley’s performance uses that structure as a starting point, his own rhythmic variation — the main source of expressivity on these instruments — gently flexible rather than sharply contrasted. The recording is a good advertisement for what made Sweelinck, in his own day, the most celebrated composer in Europe. Sweelinck, who died in 1621, was known more for skill than innovation, the culmination of a style rather than its founder, but to take him out for a drive is to experience that combination of fantasy and inevitability that seemingly never goes out of style.
.jpg)
