Geminiani: Pièces de Clavecin for Harpsichord

Few figures in the history of Baroque music have been so thoroughly misplaced by posterity as Francesco Geminiani. He is remembered, when he is remembered at all, as a violinist — Corelli’s most celebrated student, the man Handel once refused to accompany because his tempos were so wayward — and as the composer of concerti grossi that occasionally surface in period-instrument surveys of the Italian Baroque. That he also produced a substantial body of harpsichord music, music that is genuinely French in its bones, tends to come as a surprise. It shouldn’t.

The Pièces de clavecin have a curious double origin. They are arrangements — Geminiani’s own arrangements — of his string sonatas, principally those of Op. 1 and Op. 2, reworked for solo keyboard. Transcription was ordinary commerce in the eighteenth century, but what Geminiani did here is something else: he didn’t simply shovel violin lines onto a keyboard staff. He reimagined the material. The writing is genuinely idiomatic, which suggests he understood the harpsichord from the inside — though exactly how well he played it is one of those biographical questions the record has simply swallowed.

Paris made him. His first extended stay there, beginning at the end of 1732, seems to have cracked something open. The French clavecinists — Couperin’s generation and its heirs — wrote music of extraordinary refinement and ornamental extravagance, and Geminiani absorbed it with the attentiveness of someone who had come to learn, not merely to perform. The result, published simultaneously in London and Paris in 1743, bears French fingerprints everywhere: the rondeau form, those elegant doubles that vary a melody with increasing embellishment, and French-language rendition indications throughout. This is not mere stylistic tourism. By the time he wrote his Op. 4 violin sonatas, Geminiani had already been thinking in French for years.

Andrew Lawrence-King brings to this music a harpsichord touch that is both precise and — and this is rarer than it sounds — genuinely improvisatory in feeling. He doesn’t over-ornament, which is a real danger here; the doubles already carry considerable decoration, and a heavy hand with additional embellishments turns baroque elegance into rococo clutter. Lawrence-King trusts the lines. There are moments in the slower rondeaux where he allows a phrase to breathe just past the point of comfort — a calculated risk that pays off, the silence before the return carrying real harmonic tension.

What comes through most strikingly is the music’s ambiguity of personality. These pieces are neither fully Italian nor fully French. They have the melodic directness — sometimes almost bluntness — of the Italian tradition, the singing lines that Geminiani inherited from Corelli, set inside formal structures and ornamental conventions that are thoroughly Parisian. The combination is not always entirely comfortable. Some of the rondeau movements feel slightly stiff in their galanterie, as though the composer is code-switching between two musical languages and occasionally catches himself mid-idiom. But that tension is also what makes the music interesting. It has a slight foreignness to it even within its own genre — the work of an Italian in Paris who never quite stopped being an Italian in Paris.

Lawrence-King’s instrument — bright, responsive, with a clarity in the upper register that serves the melodic lines well — is well-suited to music that lives primarily in the treble. The bass lines in these arrangements carry something of the basso continuo tradition they came from, more harmonic scaffolding than independent voice, and occasionally one wishes for a touch more weight down below. But this is a minor caveat.

There is no crowded field of competing recordings here. Geminiani’s harpsichord music remains something of a specialist preserve, and this release — carefully prepared, intelligently played — does the composer the considerable service of presenting him as something more than a footnote to Corelli. That, by itself, is worth something. That it’s also a genuinely pleasurable listen makes it easy to recommend.