Washington and Lee University will present harpsichordist William McCorkle in a faculty recital on Tuesday, May 6, at 8 p.m. in Wilson Concert Hall. Entitled “Elegance and Eloquence: 17th-century Harpsichord Music Across Europe,’ the program will feature compositions by four great masters, Orlando Gibbons (15831625), Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643), Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre (16651729), and Georg Böhm (1661-1733).
Orlando Gibbons is recognized as one of the most brilliant musicians of his time in England, where his output of vocal, choral and keyboard music have led scholars of our day to refer to Gibbons as the “Mozart” of his day. McCorkle will play Gibbons’s “Fantasia in G” and the elaborate keyboard dances, “Pavan and Galliard Lord Salisbury.” The inclusion of Gibbons on the program is part of worldwide observance of the 400th anniversary of the composer’s death.
Gibbons’s contemporary, Girolamo Frescobaldi, was a central figure in Italian and European keyboard music of the 17th century. Organist at St. Peter’s basilica in Rome, Frescobaldi, in his several books of keyboard compositions, expanded the scope and range of composition for, and playing of, both harpsichord and organ. McCorkle will sample Frescobaldi’s oeuvre with a “Toccata” (1637), a display piece for the keyboard, with a kaleidoscopic array of sounds and finger techniques; and the “Capriccio Cromatico con Ligature al Contrario” (1626), a complex treatment of harmonic chord progressions with intricate manipulation of dissonance.
The 17th-century French harpsichord world will be represented on the May 6 program with the “Suite in G Minor” (1687) by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a prominent Parisian musician, who, at a young age, was brought into the company of musicians of the royal court of Louis IV. The “Suite in G Minor,” from her first book (1687) of harpsichord works, was one of relatively few such collections published in the 17th century.
The program will conclude with a sampling of the keyboard music by the master musician Georg Böhm, who flourished in the German city of Lüneburg, where he was an important mentor of the young J.S. Bach. Mc-Corkle will play Böhm’s substantial showpiece, the “Prelude, Fugue, and Postlude in G Minor.” The program’s concluding piece will be Böhm’s “Chaconne in D” from a grand suite of keyboard dances. The performance will be streamed at http://go.wlu. edu/livestream and at www. lexpres.org.
