“Quietly Audacious”

“Rondeau pulls off a stroke of genius” ★★★★★

“Extraordinary”

“A prodigy, [Jean Rondeau] brings baroque music up to date […]. A bewitching interpretation of [J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations], which suspended time for 1h40; all without intermission, he keeps us spellbound from beginning to end.”

“[Jean Rondeau] approaches the famous opening aria with a small improvisation, which he endows with dazzling changes of lighting and register. Later, too, his playing is finely balanced, the basses, for example, sometimes contoured and slender, sometimes with a flatness that tends towards background noise. […] Probably the most beautiful, most splendid substitute for silence there is.”

“Jean Rondeau, a prominent figure of the nouvelle vague of harpsichordists, adopts a spacious approach to Bach’s inspired and masterly Variations. […] his tempos feel carefully considered and are well judged, and his articulation all that we should expect from an eloquently punctuated and inflected conversation.”

“Under Rondeau’s fingers, the harpsichord […] doesn’t just sing. It inhabits an impressive gamut from a dark bronze tone to crystalline upper ranges; individual notes left shimmering in the air or layered in complex, moving chords. Sometimes, it sounds like a delicately plucked lute or a harp; at other moments, almost like an organ – and played with pedals, surely, because how else can so many fugue lines be sustained at once? Rich, complex, fascinating, this late-Renaissance world is never austere.”

“Rondeau is a wizard. Forget grace, forget melancholy – this is brilliance.”

“Stimulating and exciting, Rondeau proves that this music can sound as vital today as it did when
penned.”

“JS Bach’s BWV1056 in F minor has thoughtfulness, fun and flourish, followed by a reading of CPE Bach’s Wq23 Concerto in D minor which captures this stylistic wild child’s maverick choppiness with clipped, buoyant elegance.”

“Rondeau has developed an affinity for [the harpsichord] and a comfort in its presence that allow him to see in it its possibilities rather than its limitations…his agile and rock-solid finger technique means that Rameau’s Les Niais de Sologne and Royer’s La marche des Scythes can thrill as they should while never trampling on the gorgeous deep tone of the magnificent instrument…there is no doubt that he is a player of immense ability from whom we reasonably may hope for much.”

“Confié à des mains aussi expertes, le clavecin n’a rien d’un boudoir pour précieuses ridicules ou comtesses alanguies mais devient le grand écran des émotions. Jusqu’au vertige. “

“So gelungen können Bach-Debüts ausfallen.”

“Un maître du suspense qui sait ménager par son jeu ductile et dynamique plus d’une tension dramatique.”

“Rondeau is one of the most natural performers one is likely to hear on a classical music stage these days. Affectation and ostentation are not part of his makeup and, once seated at the instrument, he and the harpsichord become one. Everything after that is music-making that is masculine, direct and richly human. Rondeau is a master of his instrument with the sort of communicative gifts normally encountered in musicians twice his age. He internalizes the music he plays so completely that any interpretive ambivalence or miscalculation is unthinkable. The sincerity and modesty of his delivery are the keys to its power.”

“Il y a chez lui une autorité naturelle, multiplié par un certain brio, qui plonge l’auditeur dans une atmosphère de sureté, de sécurité intellectuelle.”

“Quel toucher ! Quelle imagination! Quelles couleurs!”