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GRAMOPHONE (07/2025)
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Reviewer :  Lindsay Kemp

Yoann Moulin has entitled this selection of works by German keyboard masters from the generation before Bach ‘Ein Klavierbüchlein’ (‘a little keyboard book’), thereby deliberately invoking the spirit of Bach’s own manuscript collections of assorted works for the use and instruction of his family. But if you think that means it’s all going to be small stuff, such thoughts will not survive the opening track, an expansive Prelude and Fugue for organ by Nicolaus Bruhns, the brilliant Buxtehude pupil who died in 1697 at the age of 32. It’s a remarkable piece, actually two fugues set amid free sections, but in which the fugues are in themselves highly individual – the subject of the first features unexpected repeated notes, while the quirky rests and syncopations of the second’s make it one of the most discombobulating fugue subjects ever devised.

There are other organ pieces, too: by Buxtehude a brilliant Toccata, a contemplative chorale-setting and a powerful C minor Ciacona that sounds awfully like a precursor to Bach’s great Passacaglia and Fugue; and by Georg Böhm – believed to have had at least some hand in the teaching of the school-age Bach – a Prelude, Fugue and Postlude that opens up in massive block-chord buildups, and another chorale. Alongside these are pieces more clearly for plucked keyboard instruments, including a French-style suite of gentle melancholy by Böhm, Bach’s own low-lying E minor Suite for the Lautenwerk or luteharpsichord (better known, indeed, in its lute colours), and the famous Menuet in G from the Anna Magdalena Notebook (here ascribed correctly to Christian Petzold). There’s also a virtuoso fugue by the venerable Hamburg organist Johann Adam Reincken, with even more repeated-note pecking in it than the Bruhns.

That all are successfully accommodated on a single instrument is down to the fact that Moulin uses a splendid pedal harpsichord by Philippe Humeau after Carl Conrad Fleischer. Borrowed from Benjamin Alard (who has been using it in his complete Bach keyboard cycle on Harmonia Mundi), it is not just some mighty monster but a harpsichord that can speak sweetly in the Böhm Suite and the chorales, and which, if it cannot match an organ for volume and colour, brings clarity and definition to its imposing repertoire. In fact, Moulin does a very good job of adapting the organ’s sound world to the more intimate one of the harpsichord – those opening Böhm chords are skilfully spread and tonally managed, the chorale melodies drawn from their surrounding textures and deftly sustained with eloquent rolled and flowing ornamentation, and the single eight-foot register plays as much of a part as does the full kitchen sink. A rewardingly conceived and thoughtfully executed recital.

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