The music of the French harpsichordists, on the other hand, is less regularly encountered on a concert grand. In a wide-ranging programme, Mishka Rushdie Momen bucked the trend, bringing an unforced elegance to the music of François Couperin, Jean-Philippe Rameau and Élisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre. Natural poise and fluid technique ensure lines have room to breathe while remaining within the bounds of baroque keyboard practice.
In Momen’s hands, the Allemande from Rameau’s E minor suite flowed like a limpid stream; likewise, the serene Musette en Rondeau, taken at a significantly slower pace than the plucked strings of a harpsichord might allow. Decorations were plentiful yet never self-conscious (the feathered denizens of the Rappel des Oiseaux trilled most politely). Elsewhere, her determined muscularity filled the hall with a richness of tone: in the earthy tread of the Provençal tambourin, for example, or the swagger of a rigaudon that could have passed muster as a sailor’s hornpipe.
It was a canny move to include some Ravel, a composer who channelled baroque forms in many of his scores. The Prélude from Le Tombeau de Couperin conjured sunshine and showers, Momen’s laser-focused trills nodding to the music’s 18th-century antecedents. She likewise found poetry in the cooly cerebral Fugue before rounding off the set with a surprisingly weighty Pavane pour une Infante Défunte.
The outlier here was John Bull’s Walsingham, a virtuoso late-Renaissance English work. The opening was appropriately spacious, but there were plenty of fireworks later with hands playing hopscotch on the keyboard and fingers a blur. It may lack the innovative spark of Rameau, but there is much to admire in Jacquet de la Guerre’s keyboard music.
The pianist brought an improvisatory elasticity to the Prélude from her second suite in G minor and refinement to the subsequent Allemande and Courante. Couperin, however, overflows with imaginative touches. The Forlane from the fourth Concert Royal neatly echoed Ravel, who borrowed the tune wholesale for his famous Tombeau.
To finish, Momen’s pristine touch and impeccable balance lent clarity to the metronomic figurations and mechanical hand crossings of Le Tic-Toc-Choc.
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