Muffat: Harpsichord Parthien – Akutagawa

Nepotism, in the eighteenth-century Habsburg court, could still occasionally produce a genuine artist, and Gottlieb Muffat is Exhibit A. Everybody remembers the father, Georg, who studied with Lully and Corelli and left behind those wonderful Armonico Tributo concertos. The son gets filed under footnote — court organist in Vienna for decades, teacher to the Empress Maria Theresa’s children, a name Handel scholars trot out mainly to explain where certain themes in the keyboard suites came from. That’s a shame. Worse than a shame, actually: a small crime of musicological neglect.

Naoko Akutagawa clearly thinks so too, and after hearing four minutes of the Parthie in D minor I’m inclined to agree with her without reservation.

What strikes you first is the harmonic restlessness. Muffat writes allemandes that keep second-guessing themselves — a phrase will establish itself, seem to want to cadence, and then veer sideways into some chromatic thicket that has no business in what looks, on paper, like a conventional dance suite. There’s a moodiness here, an almost neurotic attention to ornamentation, that goes well beyond decorative habit. He’d absorbed Fux’s counterpoint and the French agréments in more or less equal measure, and the result — especially in the Parthie Parisien in A minor — is music of real psychological shadow. Dark-hued, harmonically unstable in a way that feels deliberate rather than accidental. You can hear why Handel found things worth borrowing.

Akutagawa plays a reproduction instrument with a dry, almost husky lower register, not the silvery brilliance you get from a Flemish-style Ruckers copy, but something earthier, more baritonal. It suits this repertoire remarkably well. The mechanism is close to silent, no distracting clatter in the returns, a small mercy on recordings like this, and she uses the instrument’s coloristic range with real imagination. Registration choices in the Componimenti Musicali no. 1 practically simulate crescendo through sheer rhythmic manipulation and voicing.

Her fingerwork is immaculate without turning academic. Ornaments arrive as if she’s just thought of them, trills that snap shut rather than dribble away, mordents placed with a rhythmic wit that keeps the ear alert through even the longer movements (the Parisien runs past twenty minutes and never once drags). This is her fifth outing for Naxos in a project that has so far taken in Le Roux, Graupner, and Storace, and her judgment across such varied national styles holds up. She doesn’t impose a house style. The French repertoire sounds French; this sounds unmistakably, idiosyncratically Viennese, or at least Vienna-adjacent, since Muffat’s harmonic imagination often reaches back toward Frescobaldi and forward toward nobody in particular. He is his own dead end, stylistically, which is part of the fascination.

Is there competition? There is, and formidable competition at that. Mitzi Meyerson recorded the complete Componimenti Musicali, all seven of them, for Glossa back in 2009, a two-disc set that remains, structurally, the more scholarly proposition. Meyerson’s playing has an angularity, a slightly astringent intelligence, that some listeners will prefer. But it’s a double album at more than double the price, and Naxos knows exactly what market it’s serving. Joseph Payne’s older Centaur disc and Borbala Dobozy’s Hungaroton recordings cover some of the same ground too, neither quite matching Akutagawa for sheer tonal allure.

Alison Dunlop’s booklet notes deserve mention, genuinely absorbing on the tangled provenance of these manuscripts, the kind of detective work that keyboard musicology thrives on and rarely gets to show off. Worth reading before, not just after.

None of this makes Muffat his father’s equal, and nobody should pretend otherwise. But equal isn’t the right measure. This is real music, sinewy, harmonically adventurous, full of small surprises, played by a harpsichordist who understands exactly what makes it tick. Recommended, unreservedly, and at Naxos prices there’s no excuse not to hear it.