570459 bk Graupner US 11/6/08 10:03 Page 4 Also available: Johann Christoph GRAUPNER Partitas for Harpsichord 8.557884 8.570335 Partita in A major Partita in C minor Partita in F minor Get this free download from Classicsonline! Fischer: Euterpe (Suite No. 6): Chaconne (‘Winter’) Copy this Promotion Code NaxZWO8e52fI and go to http://www.classicsonline.com/mpkey/fis36_main. Downloading Instructions Chaconne in A major 1 Log on to Classicsonline. If you do not have a Classicsonline account yet, please register at http://www.classicsonline.com/UserLogIn/SignUp.aspx. 2 Enter the Promotion Code mentioned above. 3 On the next screen, click on “Add to My Downloads”. Naoko Akutagawa 8.570459 4 570459 bk Graupner US 11/6/08 10:03 Page 2 Johann Christoph Graupner (1683-1760) nearly contemporaries and barely out of their teens, en rondeau element of an opening “theme” repeated in Partitas for Harpsichord duelling at the harpsichord in the orchestra pit of the the middle and at the end) comes at the end of one of the Hamburg opera after a frustrating rehearsal. longest of the partitas, which already has two of In 1722 the town council of Leipzig was searching for a and performance of large-scale vocal and orchestral Graupner’s partitas are stylistically more advanced Graupner’s favoured final movements: a set of new cantor for the church of St Thomas. They first works, the great mass of which (including 1442 than Handel’s, simply because they were in all variations and a gigue. To add the chaconne would accepted the application of the most famous musician in cantatas) are only now being catalogued. Here we are likelihood composed later. Whereas Handel seldom elongate the partita out of all proportion. The work Germany, Georg Philipp Telemann, who parlayed their concerned with the more intimate art of the harpsichord. goes beyond the Italian idiom of around 1700 - Corelli, clearly belongs to a South German tradition of offer into better working conditions for himself in Graupner had a sterling reputation as a performer, and Bernardo Pasquini, Alessandro Scarlatti - Graupner can monumental one-off chaconnes and passacailles, and Hamburg. The annoyed council then turned to the the extreme requirements of virtuosity in his suites for include influences from later French and Italian schools, so, taking into account the compilatory nature of the Kapellmeister of one of the major German courts, that the instrument would seem to confirm this. He was the particularly the Venetian concerto style. The standard source, we have taken the liberty of detaching it from of the Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt. He is the subject first German to recommend in print the use of the thumb order of dances is often tossed overboard entirely, and the other movements. Standing alone, it is revealed as of our recording: Johann Christoph Graupner. His for scales, in the preface to his first published keyboard the current German idea of a “mixed style” is here perhaps the most superb of all the many keyboard master ostensibly refused let him go, and raised his works: a set of “partitas” (1718), a misnomer for a suite realised to such a degree as to become almost chaotic. works of the genre, certainly the most flamboyant, the salary too. As one councillor put it, “since we cannot get of dances, taken over from his old schoolmaster The immense Chaconne in A major deserves special most extreme - in a word, the most baroque. the best, we must settle for a mediocrity”, and so, with a Kuhnau. Another set of suites followed in 1722, and in mention. This series of variations on a four-bar bass line warm recommendation from Graupner, they hired the 1733 he started publication of a series of partitas called (actually the traditional passacaille bass, with an added Glen Wilson Kapellmeister of a petty court town near Leipzig, one “The Four Seasons” - but either he never pursued the Johann Sebastian Bach. The cantorate was an enterprise beyond “Winter”, or the others have been advancement for him, at least in status, if not ultimately lost. in quality of life. This last work is included in our recording - the This story serves here not to illustrate the obtuseness others here presented were never printed. They are Naoko Akutagawa of the good Leipzig burghers, but to point up the high found in an undated manuscript, beautifully prepared by esteem in which Graupner, now largely forgotten, was a court copyist, containing seventeen untitled suites by Naoko Akutagawa was born in Hiroshima in 1974. She studied piano there from the age held at the time. He was born in Kirchberg in Saxony in Graupner (which we will call partitas), alongside works of three and in Tokyo with Masayasu Oshima. At sixteen she switched to the harpsichord, 1683. His talent as a choirboy was recognized early on, by the three colleagues who probably exercised the most and studied privately with Chiyoko Arita before entering her class at the Tohogakuen and he became a choir student at St Thomas under influence on him: Kuhnau, Telemann, and Handel. This College of Music. Her chamber music instructor there was Masahiro Arita. She took her Kuhnau for eight years, until 1704. (Telemann arrived in is, therefore, a highly personal document, compiled, I soloist diploma in 1997. In that year she entered the Musikhochschule in Würzburg, Leipzig as a student in 1701, and promptly took over the think, for his master the Landgrave after he stopped Germany, as a student of Glen Wilson, ending her studies with the Meisterklasse diploma Collegium Musicum. They renewed their friendship composing for the harpsichord. It contains his finest and in 2001. She had been appointed assistant professor in 1999, a position in which she when Telemann was working in Frankfurt, near most difficult keyboard music - probably too difficult to continues to the present. She pursues a flourishing career in chamber music and as a Darmstadt.) Graupner fled Leipzig as a war refugee in be considered for publication, and thus reserved for soloist in Germany, recently performing Mozart concertos on the fortepiano to great 1706, breaking off his law studies, and went to Hamburg, private performance. The preludes, in particular, are critical acclaim. Her recordings have been broadcast by Japanese state radio and where his period of residence overlapped with Handel’s highly improvisatory and technically demanding. European stations. Naoko Akutagawa made her début recording for Naxos in 2005 with last months at the Gänsemarkt opera. It was at this house The probable encounter with Handel in Hamburg, the complete works for harpsichord by Gaspard le Roux. She was a prize-winner of the where Graupner’s meteoric rise began in 1707, first as and certainly an acquaintance with his “Eight Great” 2006 Bonporti Competition in Rovereto, Italy, and in 2007 was guest musical staff at the harpsichordist, then as composer of five operas and suites published in 1720, clearly bear fruit here. Netherlands Opera, Amsterdam. collaborator, with Reinhard Keiser, on three others. In Graupner’s suites parallel, even surpass Handel’s in 1709 he was invited to Darmstadt as vice-Kapellmeister; grandeur of conception and gesture, and sometimes he rose to the top post on his predecessor’s death in match the younger man in musical substance. They 1712, remaining there until his own, in 1760. Blindness share a robust, adventurous sensibility and a love of overtook him in old age, as it did Bach. elaborate decoration typical of the German high Graupner’s main duties involved the composition baroque. It is pleasant to imagine the two young Saxons, 8.570459 23 8.570459 570459 bk Graupner US 11/6/08 10:03 Page 2 Johann Christoph Graupner (1683-1760) nearly contemporaries and barely out of their teens, en rondeau element of an opening “theme” repeated in Partitas for Harpsichord duelling at the harpsichord in the orchestra pit of the the middle and at the end) comes at the end of one of the Hamburg opera after a frustrating rehearsal. longest of the partitas, which already has two of In 1722 the town council of Leipzig was searching for a and performance of large-scale vocal and orchestral Graupner’s partitas are stylistically more advanced Graupner’s favoured final movements: a set of new cantor for the church of St Thomas. They first works, the great mass of which (including 1442 than Handel’s, simply because they were in all variations and a gigue. To add the chaconne would accepted the application of the most famous musician in cantatas) are only now being catalogued. Here we are likelihood composed later. Whereas Handel seldom elongate the partita out of all proportion. The work Germany, Georg Philipp Telemann, who parlayed their concerned with the more intimate art of the harpsichord. goes beyond the Italian idiom of around 1700 - Corelli, clearly belongs to a South German tradition of offer into better working conditions for himself in Graupner had a sterling reputation as a performer, and Bernardo Pasquini, Alessandro Scarlatti - Graupner can monumental one-off chaconnes and passacailles, and Hamburg. The annoyed council then turned to the the extreme requirements of virtuosity in his suites for include influences from later French and Italian schools, so, taking into account the compilatory nature of the Kapellmeister of one of the major German courts, that the instrument would seem to confirm this. He was the particularly the Venetian concerto style. The standard source, we have taken the liberty of detaching it from of the Landgrave of Hessen-Darmstadt. He is the subject first German to recommend in print the use of the thumb order of dances is often tossed overboard entirely, and the other movements.