The Frans Brüggen Project

Frans Brüggen left an extraordinary heritage following his death in 2014. The Dutch recorder player and conductor, a leading figure in the early music revival, lives on in his many recordings, his lasting influence as a teacher and through the period-instrument orchestra he co-founded. His legacy also survives in the form of one of the world’s great collections of historic recorders, instruments crafted by some of the finest makers of the early 1700s. “This album is a homage to the instruments, but it’s also a homage to Frans Brüggen,” recorder player Lucie Horsch tells Apple Music Classical. “He was such a central figure in early music performance and has always been an inspiration to me.” Brüggen assembled his collection at a time when ancient recorders could still be found among the clutter of antique shops and general auction sales. He bought them to be played, which he did often throughout his long career. Lucie Horsch was given the rare opportunity to explore and play on instruments from Brüggen’s collection. She then conceived the idea of recording a unique album comprising repertoire chosen to suit the individual sound qualities of 14 of his recorders, built between c.1680 and c.1750. Those whose first and quite possibly last experience of the recorder came during schooldays will surely be amazed by the variety of tone colours and expressive shadings that Horsch conjures from Brüggen’s collection. Each instrument, she notes, has its own character and quirks, rooted in its construction from organic materials including boxwood, ebony and ivory, and its maker’s signature style. “I feel that what worked really well, as a general principle to approaching these historical recorders, was to take their timbre as the most important character, to find their sound colour first and let the rest follow from that. What helped me most was first to find the core of the sound, which I think is what guided their makers.” Horsch began by looking at and listening to Brüggen’s instruments, playing scales and recording the results. “It was like a first date, really. I played them all, and got a sense of their sound quality. It was all very intuitive. ‘OK,’ I thought, ‘I can imagine this instrument would sound best in French Baroque music, or this one needs a slow piece’, or ‘Oh, this sopranino has a brilliancy, so I want to use it in some kind of birdsong-like piece.’ But of course, there were some limitations in what was physically possible on the instruments.” The latter included the soft type of tonguing that each demanded, gentler than that used on modern recorders to project sound in a large concert hall, and the slight differences in pitch between instruments nominally in the same key. Horsch recalls how pitch discrepancies were offset in ensemble pieces by using two harpsichords set up in different tunings and retuned as required. Brüggen’s historic recorders, she adds, lacked the double holes built as standard into modern instruments to enable players to produce well-tuned low chromatic notes, which in turn influenced her choice of repertoire. “There were many limitations with this project, which made it a very creative process. It’s good to have them because sometimes there are just too many options, just as in life in general. It was a comforting feeling—that there was something setting limits on what I was able to play. So that made the repertoire list shrink significantly. It was very much like, OK, these instruments are ruling the whole process: the recording schedule, the way the microphones had to be positioned, and so on. The whole project was in a way made in service to Frans Brüggen’s collection.”