***

Dynamic playing by harpsichordist Lucy Carolan imbues these works with great spirit and verve. She plays with electrifying skill that adds a sparkle and pizzazz to pieces that require great technical skill. Bach had turned his attention to these secular works in the 1730s after writing a prodigious amount of church music, in Leipzig. Carolan's immaculate sense of rhythm gives them fresh life.

Early Music Forum of Scotland News

This impressive CD contains some of the key works which Bach wrote for the harpsichord including the Italian Concerto BWV 971 and the French Overture BWV 831. Performing on a copy of a double-manual Mietke harpsichord of 1704, Lucy Carolan produces readings which are witty, feisty and deeply thoughtful, her impeccable technique ensuring that not a note goes astray, while an extremely sensitive touch provides subtle dynamic and textural variations. This powerful follow-up to the same performer's much praised recording of the Bach Partitas confirms her place among the leading exponents of the harpsichord in Britain today.

D James Ross

ClassicsToday.com, March 2003
Artistic quality 8, Sound quality 9

The world may not need another harpsichord recording of Bach's Italian Concerto or Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue, but Lucy Carolan's solid musicianship and first class technique serve these war-horses well. While some of her agogic adjustments in the Italian Concerto's opening movement tend to get in the music's way, her ruminative shaping of the Andante and strong, vigorous Presto finale more than compensate. Carolan admirably points up the Chromatic Fantasy's improvisatory sweep, albeit to less bravura effect than Masaaki Suzuki's cyclonic traversal on BIS.

If Carolan doesn't quite match Igor Kipnis' rhythmic flamboyance in the huge French Overture, her genuine feeling for each movement's specific dance-like character is enhanced by thoughtful ornamentation on repeats and subtle shifts in registration. And her spacious, flexible phrasing organically underscores the Four Duets' extraordinary harmonic invention. Carolan's harpsichord is miked at enough of a distance to give the impression of how the instrument might project in a small, not overly resonant room, which makes the whole recital fall easily on the ear.

Jed Distler