Frescobaldi: Complete Keyboard Works

Definitive recordings by the leading Frescobaldi performer of our time, now more conveniently packaged than ever.

In 2007, Roberto Loreggian embarked on a project that would see him record every published work by Girolamo Frescobaldi. Issued as a box in 2011, the Frescobaldi Edition was widely recognised as establishing a new standard of textual authority and interpretative understanding for a composer whose own works have never been as appreciated as much as their influence on his successors.
Then, in 2022, came a new set which committed to disc for the first time all the surviving unpublished music composed by Frescobaldi and recovered from obscure sources by Etienne Darbellay and Costanze Frey. All these recordings are now coupled with the keyboard collections from the earlier set, to present the most complete collection ever issued of Frescobaldi's works for harpsichord and organ, both sacred and secular. The importance of Frescobaldi can hardly be overstated, either for his own time or subsequent generations. In his day, his fame, as modest as it may seem to us today, exceeded that of virtually all his contemporaries, except perhaps Claudio Monteverdi, and he was unrivalled as a virtuoso. Ferrara born, he became organist at St Peter's in Rome, and attracted crowds of thousands to hear his playing. He spent seven years in Florence at the height of his career, being dissatisfied with his rewards in Rome, and wrote several collections for the Medici family, before returning to Rome.

In the genres of canzona, toccata, capriccio, partite and ricercar, Frescobaldi left many pieces that stylistically bridge lies in style the Franco-Flemish imitative polyphony of the Renaissance, and the fugal form of the Baroque age. Extravagant, ambiguous, beautiful, dramatic and sometimes exquisite, the music of Frescobaldi is the musical equivalent of the art of Caravaggio, Bernini and Pietro da Cortona. No less than them, he embodies early-Baroque genius in Italy.