Harpsichord Music of Bernardo Pasquini Bernardo Pasquini (1637-1710) is considered by many to be the most important composer of keyboard music in Italy between Girolamo Frescobaldi (1583-1643) and Domenico Scarlatti (1685-1757). He wrote in a great variety of genres, including imitative contrapuntal pieces, free toccatas, variation sets, ground basses, dance suites and 28 figured bass sonatas for one or two performers. Pasquini was known in his time as a great keyboard virtuoso and counted Arcangelo Corelli and Alessandro Scarlatti among his friends and colleagues. Musicians from all over Italy and Europe came to Rome to study with him. The German composer, Georg Muffat (1653-1704), who studied with Pasquini, called him “il famosissimo Apolline dell’Italia.” Despite all those accolades, Pasquini’s music remains little known today, most likely because none of his works were published during his lifetime, surviving only in hard-to-decipher autograph manuscripts. It was not until the 1960s that the first scholarly edition of Pasquini’s works appeared in the Corpus of Early Keyboard Music, edited by M.B. Haynes. Since then a fine new edition of his complete works was produced jointly by Andromeda and Il Levante Editions (2000-2009). Pasquini’s relative obscurity could possibly stem from unfair comparisons of his music to Frescobaldi’s and Scarlatti’s. Willi Apel, in his monumental History of Keyboard Music to 1700 (1972), talks about the “steep decline of Italian keyboard music after Frescobaldi’s death until the end of the seventeenth century.” The comparison is unjust: Pasquini’s music is a product of its time. It bristles with virtuosity, has moments of great expressivity, humor and above all is innovative and highly melodic. The present recording, although by no means comprehensive, is a window into the world of late seventeenth-century Italian harpsichord music that illustrates what a truly noteworthy composer Pasquini was in many styles and genres.