Looking for Rameau Pièces de Clavecin recommendations on harpsichord

[J.A.W.]

The thread title says it all. I'm not interested in piano interpretations.

[mikeweil]

The "classic" is William Christie - he loves that music, has taste and grandeur, and sensitivity, as well as good sounding harpsichords - a reference recording.

There are many good ones - those that struck me the most in recent years are these:

Tilman Skowroneck, on a fantastic sounding and beautifully recorded instrument built by his father - a desert island disc.

Skip Sempé - lots of temperament, but he knows what he's doing - Rameau was a virtuoso obsessed with technical difficulties on the harpsichord. The CD includes a bonus DVD with some Rameau and composers he influenced.

I only started writing about these on Prospero...

[Д.Д.]

Blandine Rannou on Alpha. Great sound quality as well.

Sample

Edited November 11, 2012 by Д.Д.

[J.A.W.]

Like in the Händel Keyboard Suites someone recommended Sophie Yates' interpretation of the Rameau Pièces to me, along with the Christie. Any thoughts on her version?

Edited November 12, 2012 by J.A.W.

[mikeweil]

Haven't heard Yates' Rameau, but yes, Blandine Rannou's is a great one (it's on ZigZag, btw).

Edited November 12, 2012 by mikeweil

[mikeweil]

One remark: practically all recordings of Rameau's keyboard music that call themselves "complete" are in fact not, they all omit his transcriptions of pieces from "Les Indes Galantes", arguing that it wasn't real keyboard music. While you cannot simply put it on the stand and play but have to finalize the arrangements youself, this argument is nonsense as there are multiple connections between Rameau's keyboard music and his operas: he re-arranged in both ways. Christophe Rousset expalined the problems in detail in the lines notes to his recent recording:

Last year Skip Sempé and Pierre Hantai were commissioned to play Rameau's pieces on two harpsichords, for the major part they made their own transcriptions, with brilliant results:

[mikeweil]

Their liner notes on the relation between Rameau's keyboard music and operas, are a great read and give insight on the matter.

[J.A.W.]

Just listened to audio samples of the William Christie and Sophie Yates Rameau CDs and liked Christie very much. Yates a bit less, though musically it still sounded good to me. The recording quality of the Yates didn't seem so good, though that is hard to judge with MP3 on crappy computer speakers.

Edited November 14, 2012 by J.A.W.

[king ubu]

I love this 4CD set, at least the three solo discs in it!