Thomas Roseingrave: Eight Harpsichord Suites and other keyboard works in Bloomington, MN

The oddly named
Thomas Roseingrave
was highly regarded by composers of his own time but is all but forgotten in ours; this release by harpsichordist
Bridget Cunningham
is one of the few to take it up since it was championed by composer
Constant Lambert
years ago. The neglect is surely due in part to a more general failure to investigate the work of Irish composers (
Roseingrave
was born in Winchester but spent most of his life in Dublin) and in part to the fact that his music is tough to classify and doesn't fit the usual narratives. After apparently flunking out of Trinity College in Dublin, he was sent to Italy to study music and met
Domenico Scarlatti
. He was so depressed by
Scarlatti
's superior talent that he refused to play the harpsichord for a month, but he ended up as a champion of
's music, performing it and editing a volume of it in sheet music form. The influence is easily audible in the confidently named
A Celebrated Concerto
toward the end of the program and the
exercises that
edited that follows. The eight harpsichord suites are something else again. They are French-style dance suites with bold harmonic move, looking back to the suites of
Purcell
and even his older contemporaries.
Cunningham
does well at capturing the surprise of these and of shifting into the more brilliant Scarlattian style where it occurs. Everything is highly listenable, and Baroque buffs who have never heard of
will experience this as a real find. ~ James Manheim