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Elizabeth Anderson > reviews > Organ Summer in the Paulus Church, Darmstadt

Centuries in Minutes

Elizabeth Anderson - Harpsichord

Organ Summer in the Paulus Church, Darmstadt

“This evening you will hear sounds that you have never heard before” Wolfgang Kleber warns the 30 or so listeners present at the second Darmstadt Organ Summer Concert in the Pauluskirche on Wednesday. Actually, in her “Bizarre or Barock programme Australian harpsichordist Elizabeth Anderson interweaves pieces from the 17th and 18th centuries with new works such as Jazz and Pop arrangements.

The harpsichord sound provides a unifying thread in the juxtaposition of improvisatory freedom with the strict bonds of musical forms. Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue comes alive with the same excitement as Alec Templeton’s “Bach Goes to Town: Prelude and Fugue in Swing”. The multifaceted Elizabeth Anderson maintains a richly decorative flow, with rushing arpeggios and trills (Bach) or tumbling syncopations and blue notes (Templeton); ascends to ever higher levels of excitement and with unbridled virtuosity arrives suddenly in a state of musical weightlessness.

She plays with a brilliant palette of colours on a two manual harpsichord, built in French 18th century style in 1982 by Marian Schreiner in Darmstadt-Bessungen. Elizabeth Anderson uses this palette in the Vivaldi/Bach Concerto in D major and Handel Harmonious Blacksmith Variations to illustrate various musical “affects”. In a block of pieces entitled “Homage to Chopin and the Polish style”, the harpsichordist takes in several centuries in a matter of minutes: rhythmical Polonaises and Mazurkas – courtly and gallant in the hands of Francois Couperin, in the early classical style of Tadeusz Kosciuzko, in a magnificent specimen of Telemann and with curious sound-effects in the middle section of the Frederic Chopin.

What remains in the mind after the concert are the arrangements from Donald Angle (1943-2009): Earl Scruggs’ “Foggy Mountain Breakdown”, a light touch serving up a perpetuum mobile in a western saloon costume, in which banjo sounds and a walking bass conjure up a country music atmosphere, and the well-known Beatles cover “Eleanor-Rigby” as a groovy repeated-note bravura number. A calm contrast with distinctive glassy sounds is provided by “Winters Shadow” for harpsichord and wind chimes, a fascinating study from Australian composer, Mary Mageau (born 1934)

After Mozart’s “Alla Turka” the chromatic revisions of the minimalist, metrically tricky patterns of Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo alla Turka”, draw the bow back to the beginning of an unconventional concert with an exceptional programme and an exceptional artist.

Albrecht Schmidt, Darmstädter Echo, July 2, 2010

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