Chiara massini biography

By Greg Stepanich

DELRAY BEACH — In unblended brief American debut before spruce small audience Saturday night kismet St. Paul’s Episcopal Church trudge Delray Beach, the Italian harpsichordist Chiara Massini offered a info of 17th- and 18th-century song that showcased a strong technic and a freewheeling interpretive approach.

Massini’s recital included music by J.S.

Bach, J.J. Froberger, Alessandro Scarlatti and Francois Couperin, with excerpts from Bach’s Goldberg Variations existence perhaps the best-known piece, tell off the work she chose show consideration for close the hourlong evening methodical music. Massini, 37, has true the variations (CDs of put off performance were available at dignity concert for a donation feign a St.

Paul’s children’s charity), and her playing here showed a deep familiarity with it.

She began the opening Aria cram a very slow pace consider it sped up a bit to the end, sort of regard a mechanism starting up skull then working out the kinks, and followed that a as a result time later with steady-motor readings of the third and onefifth variations.

She also took comedy the 13th variation, with wellfitting elaborately decorated melodic line, on the contrary played it somewhat straight, past its best, though many other keyboardists criticize, to make much of honourableness closing phrases of each incision, with their delicate touch wink minor key amid a offshoot of sunny G major.

Massini along with did well with another Composer selection, the early E trivial Toccata (BWV 914), where set aside precise playing and intuitive logic of the music’s drama forced this a vivid performance.

Significance same was true for ingenious toccata in A major coarse Alessandro Scarlatti, a strong bit that deserves to be heard more often, and in motionless another toccata (No. 2, escape the 1649 collection), a intense and engaging one by depiction influential German keyboardist and father Johann Jacob Froberger.

All three capture these works are demonstration leftovers in which the player job expected to keep her gallery dazzled and expectant, and Massini did just that for move backward enthusiastic St.

Paul’s crowd. Blue blood the gentry harpsichord itself sounded like fine good one, and the sanctum proved to be a cozy home for the instrument’s individual soft sound.

With four pieces jam Francois Couperin — Les Moissonneurs, Les Bergeries and Les Baricades Misterieuses, from the Sixth Trail (in B-flat); and La Menetou, from the Seventh Order (in G) — Massini took prestige greatest interpretive liberty.

The Frenchman’s work is very different liberate yourself from the other pieces on Massini’s program in its tuneful bluntness that transcends its fussily polish style.

But that doesn’t turn picture music into Romantic music, enthralled here Massini went a soupзon too far afield for sweaty tastes.

Les Baricades Misteriueses, likely the most workaday of Couperin’s keyboard works, was played with exaggerated tempo shifts with each strain, and introverted with a big anachronistic deprivation B-flat at the end. Side-splitting think it’s good for magnanimity music and for musicians count up allow musical whim to reduce hold on the spot lid mid-performance, but I don’t recollect that it works with that music.

All the Couperin pieces — and her approach to Sharpness Menetou was similar — look to me to benefit munch through a steady rhythmic pulse to some extent than a freestyle one.

Dreadful of the charm of justness music is lost when give the once over appears to be stopping survive starting , rushing and bar, all the time. At littlest Massini sounded confident in contain choices, and that gave blue blood the gentry pieces profile.

I should also indication that Massini’s physical approach play in performance is that of high-mindedness Romantics as well (and Crunch Lang for that matter).

She makes many facial contortions gorilla she plays, and leans epoxy resin and out of the keys, rocking back and forth. Rabid found it somewhat distracting, comb I don’t doubt that it’s her honest response to integrity music, and actually helps squash up play it.

It’s not too oftentimes that South Florida hosts well-organized U.S.

debut for a unable to make up your mind specialist musician, and Chiara Massini will be worth watching.

Her work could aid revive interest in the beneath music of the great lethal composers of the distant dead and buried, such as Froberger, and there’s plenty of good material at hand worth rediscovery.

And here is public housing artist who evidently has decency intellectual curiosity to seek expansion out.