Boehm: Keyboard Works / Gustav Leonhardt

How many people can call to mind Andreas Schluter's monumental Der Grosse Kurfurst? How many people can visualize Christoph Paradiso's charming Young Man with a Gray Hat? Schluter and Paradiso are acknowledged to be the greatest sculptor and the greatest painter in the German states in the period after the Thirty Years' War, and yet one would guess that very few people would know who Schluter and Paradiso are. Why, then, should anyone care about Gustav Leonhardt's 1992 recording of eight keyboard works by Georg Bohm, by no means the greatest keyboard composer of the postwar period? Bohm's keyboard music is occasionally fascinating, as in the fiery Praeludium in G minor that opens the disc, but more often merely a less interesting Buxtehude, as in the Suite in E flat major that closes it. The only reason to care about this disc is if one is more interested in the performer than the repertoire. Thankfully, the performer is Gustav Leonhardt, the godfather of the early music movement and one of the two or three truly great musicians to come out of that movement. On this Bohm disc, Leonhardt's performances on harpsichord and clavichord are sensitive, supple, soulful, and, above all, virtuosic. Although Bohm's music is not in and of itself all that captivating, Leonhardt's playing makes listening to this disc entirely absorbing. Sony's sound is as warm and textured as a good cognac.