Lebègue: Pieces for Organ

Description

Nicolas Lebègue is remembered as one of the most erudite composers of the late seventeenth century. He was the organist at Saint-Merry in Paris and known as the teacher of Nicolas de Grigny and François D'Agincourt, among others. Apart from his three books of organ music (1676, 1678 and 1685), he also published two collections of pieces for the harpsichord in 1677 and 1687. This series draws together Lebègue's keyboard music in three volumes from printed and manuscript sources. The first contains the two harpsichord books and the only known manuscript; the second volume includes the printed organ books; the third acts as an appendix to Volume II and presents pieces attributed to Lebègue from two known sources, Le Manuscrit Caumont Orgue and a manuscript in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, copied by Sébastien de Brossard between 1688 and 1698.

David Ponsford is an organist, harpsichordist and musicologist. He was Greenwood Exhibitioner at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and after some years as Assistant Organist of Wells Cathedral, he gained a PhD at Cardiff University under the supervision of Professor Peter Williams. His book ‘French Organ Music in the Reign of Louis XIV' was published by Cambridge University Press in 2011 (paperback edition, 2016), and his editions of Biber's Mystery (Rosary) Sonatas and Nicolas de Grigny's Premier livre d'orgue were published by Ut Orpheus, Bologna, in 2007 and 2019 respectively. Among his many recordings are a series of eight CDs of French Baroque organ music played on historical instruments for Nimbus Records, all four parts of J. S. Bach's Clavierübung , and the complete Bach violin sonatas with Jacqueline Ross. in 2021 he was appointed Organ Teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, and in 2024 he was awarded The Medal of the Royal College of Organists for distinguished achievements in scholarship and performance.