Gustav Leonhardt in French

I hope you can understand this.

 

http://fi.babelfish.yahoo.com/trans...m/p2245/a359481.html&lp=fr_en&btnTrUrl=Käännä

 

I particularly liked:

NR. O. - Bach, however, is not very well written for the voice.
G. Leonhardt. - Yes, it is card-indexed some! Incredible [your of rapture]!

Translation of the original:
G. Leonhardt. - Yes, he doesn't give a damm! Incredible (said with rapture!)

 

But G. Leonhardt is Dutch, not French.
Perhaps he did mean 'Yes, it is card-indexed some! Incredible [your of rapture]!'

 

In which case, he must have said:
Ja, wordt het kaart-geïndexeerda wat! Ongelooflijk [uw van vervoering]!

Which, after a few translations, gives us what Leonhardt really meant:
Yes, the indexation of the card is changed-d-ed that! Not being credible [its of the dither]!

But it is best rendered in Italian:
Sì, l'indicizzazione della carta è ed variabile quello! Non essendo credibile [relativo del tremore]!

Which means the French translation was indeed bad: here is the true one:

Oui, l'indexation du papier est variable et cela n'étant pas croyable ... [relatif du tremblement] !

It was about scores, then... Who would ever say it if it weren't for Boblefush!

 

I would say is that Leonhardt is not a romantic. He does better with earlier music ... I presume (let's leave that one aside for now). Rameau, one of my favorite composers, and a romantic in baroque costume, is played too thinly, there is no "singing" to the performance, and many pieces are played too fast. Some are barely recognizable. Once you've "expedited" Rameau, you've lost my sympathy, and what you do to Duphly et al. is academic. Technically immaculate? Well, yes, if by technical we understand hitting the right notes. But the more I hear really "meaty" performances, like Katherine Roberts-Perl's, I realize what always bothered me in Leonhardt's rather clinical playing: no soul. Add to this the quite uninteresting engineering, in which the microphones are much too far from the soundboard, and I'm afraid we have a recording that will satisfy neither the novice nor the expert, a CD on which someone in a room, somewhere, plays some music on a harpsichord.

 

Hi, Alex, welcome.

I don't know the record you are referring to. But I would say that the latter Leonhardt is less moving than the one that performed in the 80ies.

There is a marvelous Sweelinck record by him, and perhaps an even better one with Louis Couperin's music. I must say he is not my favorite Bach interpreter, but it is impossible to ignore, say, his Partitas or his Well Tempered Clavier; better yet, his Fantasia Chromatica (the one performed in the Zell harpsichord).

But for latter French music there are, arguably, better attuned players than Leonhardt.