New Music / Musique actuelle: New Music for Harpsichord from Canada and The Netherlands
Vivienne Spiteri / Bengt Hambraeus, Louis Andriessen, Hope Lee, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, Ton de Leeuw, Tim Brady
… our most active interpreter of new music for harpsichord… — The Toronto Star, Canada
… une claveciniste à découvrir… — Le Devoir, Québec
Vivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- Composer(s): Bengt Hambraeus, Louis Andriessen, Hope Lee, Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux, Ton de Leeuw, Tim Brady
- Performer(s): Vivienne Spiteri
- Canada Council for the Arts
CD (SNE 542)
- 1Capriccio I (Bengt Hambraeus) (1980), 6:58harpsichordVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- 2Overture to Orpheus (Louis Andriessen) (1982), 12:04harpsichordVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- 3harpsichordVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- 4Miroirs (Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux) (1975), 10:10harpsichord and fixed mediumVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- 5Mo-Do (Ton de Leeuw) (1974), 9:12harpsichordVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- 6Reaching Past (Tim Brady) (1986), 14:22harpsichord and fixed mediumVivienne Spiteri, harpsichord
- Label: Société nouvelle d’enregistrement
- SNE 542
- 1988
- Total duration: 66:46
- Jewel case
- 125 mm × 142 mm × 10 mm
- 115 g
On the web
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In the press
Review
Vivienne Spiteri has become our most active interpreter of new music for harpsichord, a distinction reinforced by the application of her double manual Hubbard to the four (Canadian) works on this album.
Critique
… une claveciniste à découvrir, d’autant qu’elle a le courage de s’attaquer à un répertoire exclusivement contemporain, Vivienne Spiteri laisse un excellent souvenir de son premier disque.
Review
Several decades after its revival as a concert instrument, the harpsichord is well into its second renaissance. This new album by the Canadian harpsichordist Vivienne Spiteri features six works written for the instrument since the mid-seventies.
Included are pieces by Louis Andriessen and Bengt Hambraeus and by lesser-known Dutch and Canadian composers. Spiteri has been touring with this repertoire for some time, and her recorded efforts have a mature, authoritative sound.
Several of the pieces display curiosity about the harpsichord’s distinctive sonority, and a few make feints in the direction of its brave baroque past. Hambraeus’ Capriccio I, for example, is sprinkled with souvenirs of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century idioms, the easy co-existence of which suggests a notion of the tradition that is like a view through several translucent panes of glass.
Hope Lee’s Melboac rigorously parses the permutations of her virile sonograms, while Andriessen’s Overture to Orpheus sets up a languid canon of voices so close as to seem each other’s shadow. Tim Brady’s Reaching Past and Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux’s Miroirs use electronics to play with some of the harpsichord’s steelier sonorities, while Ton de Leeuw’s acoustic, Mo-Do has a contemplative Oriental cast.
In all, this is a fine release from Société nouvelle d’enregistrement, and a brilliant debut album for Spiteri.