Farr plays a big Keith Hill harpsichord with two buff stops and makes a great case for this music which balances wit with tenderness.

Claude-Bénigne Balbastre (1727–1799) was one of the most celebrated French harpsichord composers of his time. As Elizabeth Farr writes in her informative liner notes, Balbastre was a student of Jean-Philippe Rameau and Pierre Février in Paris. He performed to great acclaim in the Concert Spirituel, the famous Parisian concert series, and was lauded as well by Charles Burney in his The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771). Writing in the years preceding the French Revolution, Balbastre published his Pièces de clavecin in 1759. As was the fashion of the time, his pieces are musical portraits dedicated to friends, patrons, and other members of the nobility; together they offer a virtual social history of the ancien régime. This recording features the 17 pieces contained in that volume, as well as a handful of works chosen from Livre contenant des pieces de different genre d’orgue et de clavecin of 1749 (Versailles manuscript 264). Other works complete this two-CD set, including Balbastre’s transcriptions of four movements from Rameau’s opera Pygmalion and the well-known ‘Marche des Marseillois et l’air Ça-ira,” composed in 1792 and based on the most popular patriotic tunes of post revolutionary France.

Elizabeth Farr, associate professor of harpsichord and organ at the University of Colorado, captures at once Balbastre’s grandeur, brilliance, and charm. In this unique recording, Farr plays a large harpsichord with 1x16’, 2x8’, 1x4’, and two buff stops. The sheer power of the 16’ makes a stunning effect in such pieces as “La de Caze” and “La Suzanne” and contrasts with the delicacy of the two buff stops, used to be charming effect in the Gavotte Rondeau in G minor, among others. An award-winning keyboardist, Farr plays with delicacy, nuance, and dazzling virtuosity, giving new life to these wonderful works.

Claude-Bénigne Balbastre was a student of Rameau and, from 1756, organist at Saint-Roch Church at what was then Paris’ edge. The Marquis de Sade was married there in 1763, and one likes to imagine Balbastre playing these flashy, sensualist pieces of keyboard music at the event. Balbastre published a good deal of keyboard music, most of it forgotten except for a few characteristic examples, and this generous two-disc selection by harpsichordist Elizabeth Farr will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in Parisian music and culture of the 18th century. The music included covers an extended period from the late 1740s, when Balbastre’s Livre contenant des pieces de different genre d’orgue et de clavecin closely followed Rameau’s detailed little portraits in music, up to the 1790s, when the composer wrote a setting of the Marseillaise and another tune (the Marche des Marseillois et l’air Ça-ira, track 16) in a successful attempt to ingratiate himself with the revolutionary authorities. Aside from a few stabs at coming to grips with the new styles of the Classical era, Balbastre mostly just turned up the volume on the language of the late French Baroque. His music is viscerally exciting but has the quality of hitting you over the head if you listen to two entire CDs of it. Farr gives it a very fine account here. The choice of instrument is quite unorthodox, but it works. She plays a copy of a Ruckers harpsichord with an added 16’ stop, made by iconoclastic Michigan builder Keith Hill. As Hill freely concedes in a short note, neither Balbastre nor any other composer of his time is known to have used such an instrument, and Hill’s argument for using one in this project seems to boil down to the fact that it sounds cool. He could, however, have made a better argument: many of these pieces, and much of Balbastre’s output in general, was presented as suitable for either organ or harpsichord, and a performance that bulks up the harpsichord to organ dimensions makes a good deal of musical sense. At any rate, the instrument rocks, it rolls, it brings the house down. Booming sound from a mysterious small-town Michigan venue called Ploger Hall adds to the generally heated atmosphere. Farr’s own notes, which delve into Balbastre’s music in quite a bit of detail, are given in English and French.

Idiomatic in a Natural Way

The first attraction that might catch an audiophile’s ear here is the gorgeous wide-range sound of the 16’-stop harpsichord built by Keith Hill according to the design of the 18th century Ruckers harpsichord. Balbastre’s music just seems to cry out for the bass support of the 16’ stop, yet no French harpsichords from his time survive. The augmentation of the usual 8’ and 4’ stops of most harpsichords with the 16’ adds a wonderful richness to the music.

I’ve admired Elizabeth Farr’s playing in the past, while reviewing an album of d’Anglebert’s harpsichord suites (Naxos 8.570472–73). Many of the same qualities show up here in the more stylistically traditional pieces. “La d’Hericourt,” for example, provides a textbook illustration of how notes inégales and figurations can assist rather than impede the flow of the music when applied knowledgeably. As much can be said for the Gavotte Rondeau in G Minor, where the subtle firmness of the rhythm keeps matters moving along despite the treble’s flexible phrasing. Her basic tempos are varied, and always appropriate to the character of the music—from the almost Couperin-like tenderness of “La Berville,” to the difficult and assertive gigue “La Lugeac.” Technically, she dispatches everything here with a supreme ease.

As the liner notes state, “Certain composers of harpsichord music wrote pieces that beg to be played on harpsichords sporting a 16’ stop…Claude Balbastre also happens to be just such a composer, which is odd because no French harpsichords with 16’ stops remain from his time.” Whatever the reason for this, the instrument with a 16’ stop by Keith Hill that’s employed here is a fine one, very much in the manner of the rich-sounding ones by Andreas Ruckers II that have survived or been restored to their original state. The results exhibit a beautiful, even tone, with a resounding but natural depth that makes the opening rondeau of “La Boullongne” truly sound. (The second strain is especially notable.) The brightly focused, Italianate “ping” of the shorter stops suit the imported features of Balbastre’s later music, such as the Sonata No. 5 in G Major—or even the treble melody of the supremely giddy “La Monmartel ou La Brunoys.” This is a different Hill instrument from the pair Farr played in her d’Anglebert release, but just as suited to the context.

In short, full praise for this discerning yet spontaneous-sounding series of performances, provided in excellent sound.

In his character pieces Balbastre links up with tradition as compositions of this kind had been written before by François Couperin, Jacques Duphly, Jean-Baptiste Forqueray and Jean-Philippe Rameau. But Balbastre’s style is often more virtuosic and full of effects and features considerable contrasts between the various sections. La de Caze and La Bellaud are examples of extraverted and theatrical pieces, whereas La Ségur and La Berryer ou La Lamoignon are much more intimate and elegant. There are several pieces with rustic elements, reminiscent of the musette, the bag-pipe or the hurdy-gurdy.

A habitué of the French court, Citizen Balbastre nonetheless survived the French Revolution, having written a theme and variations on the Marseillaise, and died destitute in 1799. Farr’s two-disc sampling offers excerpts from a 1749 collection of organ and harpsichord sonatas and pieces, the 17 selections from his 1759 Pièces de clavecin, and two later works. The distance between the earliest items and the later First Book is wide: Mid-measure enharmonic twists give way to solidly harmonized lines. Balbastre’s Pygmalion arrangement consists of the ouverture and three pieces. Farr employs a modern Keith Hill with a 16’ stop whose grand bass excites. Compared to a random sampling of earlier releases (de la Guerre, Bach, D’Anglebert), Farr has hit her stride.

Harpsichordist Elizabeth Farr has been hitting a series of bull’s eyes in her series of discs for Naxos, no doubt aided by the extraordinary sound of the Keith Hill instruments she has been utilizing in these recordings. In Claude-Bénigne Balbastre: Music for Harpsichord, Farr turns her attention to one of the last holdouts of the French harpsichord school, Claude-Bénigne Balbastre, a favorite of the aristocracy who managed to avoid the guillotine through composing music that celebrated the French Revolution. Although these characteristics are the ones that fit best in an elevator speech about Balbastre, he enjoyed a long career lasting nearly 50 years, and this recital visits all of his relevant periods in considerable detail. In keeping with the French harpsichord tradition, Balbastre organizes into suites musical portraits named after people within his sphere of influence, but these are not pithy little bon mots in the manner of François Couperin, but are often long works generally averaging 4-8 minutes. The disc also includes a Balbastre-made transcription of movements drawn from his master Jean-Philippe Rameau’s ballet Pygmalion, and these have a big, nearly orchestral sound. The Hill harpsichord Farr plays here has a towering presence and resonance, but Farr has the right idea about how to voice this music utilizing the considerable sonic resources that the Hill instrument provides. One is concerned that the obscurity of the name and the length and breadth of the repertoire presented here might limit the potential audience for Naxos’ Claude-Bénigne Balbastre: Music for Harpsichord; however, anyone interested in Domenico Scarlatti and Rameau should very much enjoy this release.