Il Cembalo di Partenope

#Oldest Playable Harpsichord

An unsigned Renaissance harpsichord, (Naples, ca. 1525)
National Music Museum Vermillion, South Dakota, USA.

Made by an unknown Neapolitan master around 1525, the harpsichord featured in this recording is one of the finest, earliest, best-preserved and most significant historical keyboard instruments in existence.

Italian harpsichord making has often been regarded as unchanging from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries and is perceived as being uniform throughout the various kingdoms and principalities, which were only unified into a single nation towards the end of the nineteenth century. However, recent research has revealed significant differences between Italian instruments made in different eras and regions. After about 1625 Italian harpsichords were typically made with two 8’ stops to provide a solid foundation of tone for continuo accompaniment and the dramatic gestures of the Baroque solo repertoire. Early instruments from Naples and Venice, the two major centers of harpsichord making in sixteenth-century Italy, were typically designed with only one 8’ register, to which a 4’ (octave) stop was sometimes added in large instruments. The tone of these Renaissance harpsichords is transparent and bright, and the balancing of their keys accentuates the player’s tactile sense of plucking the strings.

Because the early Neapolitan harpsichord makers, unlike the better known Venetians, seldom signed or dated their work, the identification and dating of Neapolitan instruments can take decades of painstaking detective work, focusing on a wide variety of technical details. Some of the typical Neapolitan features of this instrument include the sharp angle of the tail; the maple case; spruce soundboard and the C/E to c3 compass. A virtually identical harpsichord in the Castello Sforzesco, Milan, doubtless by the same maker, has been dated by dendrochronology (tree-ring analysis) of its soundboard to 1513 as terminus post quem. With allowance for some years of seasoning, the date of the Milan instrument as a whole would be about 1525 and likewise for the Neapolitan harpsichord at the NMM.

The fact that harpsichord making was already well established in the Kingdom of Naples in the fifteenth century and had a reputation beyond regional borders is shown by the exportation of instruments to Rome in the 1470s and ’80s. The title page woodcut of Andrea Antico’s ‘Frottole intabulate da sonare organi’, published in Rome in 1517, shows a harpsichord very similar to the one featured in this recording. Further north, a strong Neapolitan influence is evident in early seventeenth-century Florentine harpsichords. Mid-century inventories also indicate that Naples was the principal source of harpsichords played at the Medici court.

The restoration of the Renaissance harpsichord consisted of little more than the removal of a second 8’ stop that had been added in the seventeenth century, restringing, and installation of a new set of jacks. The instrument was presumably intended to be strung in brass and tuned to the pitch known as tutto punto, roughly equivalent to the modern a1 = 440 hz. This remarkable instrument, which is almost certainly the oldest playable harpsichord available, could well be regarded as a time machine back to the Renaissance and the origins of keyboard music as a distinct art.

John Koster, Vermillion, South Dakota, 2016

Recorded May 2015

Location: National Music Museum, Vermillion, South Dakota, USA
Balance engineer & recording producer: Jonas Niederstadt
Corporate Design: Tim+Tim, timandtim.com
Cover photography: Philipp Dorl
Booklet photography: Jonas Niederstadt
Proofreading & Editing: Bridget Gerstner

© 2017 Carpe Diem Records

American Record Guide

"This is spellbinding. Catalina Vicens has the uncommon ability to take the listener to a different world in seconds. She has a way of making her performances sound both casual and intentional at the same time. This is difficult to describe. It sounds free, yet definitely going somewhere important.

The instrument is from Naples, cl525, and is the world's oldest playable harpsichord. It is in the National Music Museum of Vermillion, SD. It is small and simple, with a single register, but it makes an extraordinarily intense sound. [...]" B. Lehman, American Record Guide July/August 2017

Pizzicato

"In her new album, harpsichordist Catalina Vicens plays the world's oldest playable harpsichord, built in Naples around 1525, and brings Neapolitan music from that period to life. Catalina Vicens has also written a partly fictional, partly historically based story about this harpsichord, which can be read in the booklet. This is an exciting and very varied project, with the harpsichordist playing with great spirit and expressiveness, especially in the character pieces (Carpe Diem 16312)." Remy Franck, Pizzicato 2017