Eleven Toccatas in succession may seem like too much of a good thing at first glance, but appearances are deceptive, for this carefully curated programme offers considerable variety, both in terms of the music and instruments as well as the phenomenal playing of Andrea Buccarella, the harpsichordist who we also know as organist and conductor and who has already made his mark as an eminent musician on multiple labels. On this recording too, his playing excels in virtuosity and spirituality, and the characteristics of the late sixteenth-century Venetian toccata come to optimal life in their essence: the free form, the virtuosity and the improvisatory character.
Buccarella not only phrases and ornaments in a varied manner, but his imaginative playing also escapes the dry rhythmic mechanics that are entirely wrongly associated with the toccata style. He belongs to the few harpsichordists who truly understand the art of agogic differentiation within the bounds of historicizing rhetoric, thereby making their playing unmistakably expressive. Buccarella fully commands the language of this music and does not need the grammar to make it speak optimally.
The four harpsichords, replicas crafted by Philippe Humeau after Rückers and Gräbner among others, combine tonal beauty with colorfulness, whereby these toccatas by Merulo, Sweelinck, Frescobaldi, Froberger, Weckmann, Buxtehude and Bach are presented in a fine light also thanks to the excellent recording.