SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Bach, Duphly, Rameau and Scarlatti: Lucille Gruber (Harpsichord) St. Peter's Church, New York City, 3.10.2010 (SSM)


In an earlier review of a harpsichord recital by Anthony Newman, I said: There aren't a whole lot of globally prominent American harpsichordists these days, and many of those that are (were) went off to perform and conduct in Europe such as Alan Curtis, Scott Ross and William Christie. We could add Lucille Gruber to this list, she too having lived abroad, splitting her time between performing in Europe and teaching, but not performing, in the States. According to the program notes, this recital was her first in America since 1979.

The instrument on which she performed, noted in the guide as being a David Way 1999, should more accurately have been described as a Zuckerman harpsichord, probably made from a kit.  David Way was the owner of Zuckerman's Harpsichords until his death in 1994. The fact that it is a kit is not meant as denigration, but might explain some of the harpsichord's tuning and action problems.  It also might have contributed to the mistakes Ms. Gruber made in many of the pieces. (She herself admitted that she was not very familiar with this particular instrument.) Even though this harpsichord is modeled after a two-manual French-Flemish instrument of the late Baroque, Ms. Gruber was unable to coax from it whatever capabilities it might have for shaping or adding variety to the musical timbre.  The lute stop, for example, could have been used more frequently, in particular with the da capos of the Bach pieces. The dynamic range of the instrument barely changed even when the manuals were coupled. This wasn't helped by the acoustics of the church, which are more conducive to an organ than a harpsichord designed for a French chamber room.

Ms. Gruber has her own views on Baroque keyboard performance, and it is a mixed bag of traditional and more liberal schools. At times her use of rubato stretched out the slower movements so broadly that it seemed like she would have been happier if the instrument had a sostenuto pedal. Her use of ornamentation was subtle but scattered, sometimes done in the beginning dance section and sometimes in the repeat. Her decisions on when and if to play a repeat in the six Scarlatti sonatas were totally incomprehensible, and at various times arbitrary forms were chosen: A-A'-B-B', A-A' -B, A-B.  It is common practice these days to play all the repeats, often with slight ornamenting of the da capo. Even the eccentric Glenn Gould was consistent in either not playing the repeats at all, such as in the first recording of the Goldberg Variations; when he did take the repeats they were taken only when the score was so marked.

Perhaps Ms. Gruber has taught and dissected some of these pieces too many times. Her didactic side showed in her choices of Scarlatti sonatas: K.367 is clearly written to teach how to play scales, the right hand going up while the left goes down the scale.  K 455 is a practice piece for learning to play the same note repeatedly. K.119 has chords that stretch beyond an octave. Scarlatti wrote these pieces as Escersizzi for his patroness Maria Barbara, but the majority of the sonatas require tremendous agility and a full use of whatever resources the most modern and advanced harpsichords and pianofortes of the time could provide.

Rameau's Les Cyclopes was one of the few pieces for which Ms. Gruber did not need a score in front of her. Indeed, she seemed more comfortable with the highly ornamented scores of the two French composers. Aside from the thinness of this particular harpsichord, movements such as the Toccata of Bach's 6^th Partita and all the Scarlatti sonatas require a strong, forward-moving, rhythmic pulse to reveal their power: a power that Ms. Gruber did not provide. 

Stan Metzger