Anna Bon di Venezia: Six Sonatas for Harpsichord
Paule van Parys, harpsichord
Pavane ADW 7338
There’s something melancholy in discovering a composer who died at twenty-seven—not from the romantic consumption that claimed so many artists, but simply vanishing from the historical record after a promising start. Anna Bon di Venezia published these harpsichord sonatas as her Opus 2 in 1757, when she was seventeen. That’s where the Mozart comparisons should end.
Yet here they come anyway, as they must whenever we encounter a precocious talent from the eighteenth century. Bon was no Mozart. She wasn’t even a Mendelssohn. But she was a working professional performer—not some aristocratic dilettante—employed by Frederick, vice-Count of Brandenburg, and his wife Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, Frederick the Great’s sister. That matters. These sonatas represent actual professional output, music meant to be played and heard, not drawing-room exercises.
The six works show their influences plainly: C.P.E. Bach’s galant manner, the younger J.C. Bach’s emerging Classical style, the Mannheim school’s love of motivic figures built from arpeggiated patterns. The textures run predominantly to two voices, which can sound thin on a modern instrument but makes perfect sense for the intimate domestic harpsichord music this was meant to be. What’s missing—and it’s a major absence—is the developmental imagination that makes C.P.E. Bach’s keyboard works so endlessly fascinating. Where Emanuel Bach takes a triadic figure or a sequence of repeated chords and spins them into surprising harmonic territories, Bon tends to state her ideas and then… well, restate them.
That said, the slow movements contain some genuinely lyrical writing. The "Adagio" of the Third Sonata in F major has a tender, searching quality, and the "Largo" from the Fourth Sonata achieves a modest eloquence. These aren’t merely pleasant—they’re actually expressive within their limited emotional range.
Paule van Parys plays with technical precision throughout. Her fingers are nimble, her ornaments cleanly executed. The Walter Maene harpsichord sounds lovely—round bass register, clear treble without that glassy brittleness that can make extended harpsichord listening such a trial. The engineering captures a pleasantly intimate acoustic, presumably the St. Annenkapel in Diest where this was recorded in 1995.
But—and here’s the problem that dogs this entire disc—van Parys never seems to fully inhabit this music. She plays the notes. All of them, accurately. Yet there’s a curious detachment to the performances, a reluctance to shape phrases with those subtle variations in articulation and timing that make the harpsichord breathe. The instrument, for all its mechanical action, can suggest rubato through minute adjustments of touch and release. Van Parys rarely exploits these possibilities.
Watch the cadences particularly. She rushes into them, as if eager to finish one section and move to the next. This creates a perpetual sense of hurry that undermines the music’s natural grace. The Minuetto con Variazione that concludes the Sixth Sonata should offer opportunities for characterization—each variation a small study in different affects. Instead they march past like well-drilled soldiers, correct but curiously uninflected.
I kept thinking of Gustav Leonhardt’s approach to similar repertoire—that combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative freedom, the willingness to take risks with phrasing and articulation. Or even Kenneth Gilbert’s more straightforward but always engaged readings. Van Parys sounds like she’s demonstrating the music rather than performing it.
Perhaps she doesn’t quite believe in these pieces. That would be understandable—they’re historically interesting without being masterpieces. But performers have to advocate for their material, especially when it’s unfamiliar. If van Parys doesn’t make the case for Anna Bon di Venezia, who will?
The disc serves its documentary purpose admirably. These sonatas deserve to be heard, and now they’re available in competent, well-recorded performances. For scholars and curious listeners, that’s valuable. But as musical experiences, these performances remain oddly provisional—sketches for interpretations that might have been more searching, more generous, more alive to the possibilities lurking in this modest but genuine music.
Anna Bon di Venezia died young and left us little. The least we can do is play what she left with full conviction.
