INTERNATIONAL RECORD REVIEW:
The cover photo on the booklet of this new disc shows a beautiful drawing-room with at least five elegant instruments. It's the music room at Shute House, Axminster (about which it's a challenge to find any mention on the internet) and the collection they have is clearly of the highest quality. What is unusual is that these are domestic instruments, square pianos and a spinet, which may be smaller in size, but for beauty, variety and quality of tone they are certainly a match for larger, ‘concert' instruments.

The programme opens on a spinet made by Thomas Barton in 1727, very similar in so many ways to a harpsichord, but the lack of any sharpness of attack creates a halo of sound, almost guitar-like, and wonderfully evocative for Couperin's Les Barricades Mistérieuses. There is intimacy but no weakness to the sonorities, with rapid sound decay only in the highest treble registers, making it ideal for Handel and richly expressive for Byrd. It's a major leap forward from here to a Longman & Broderip square piano of 1787 on which Joanna Leach performs works by Bach and Handel, employing the lute stop to wonderful effect in Handel's ‘Air and Variations'. A Stodart square piano of 1823 is very effective in works ranging from Soler to Schubert, demonstrating a reverberant bass in Mozart's Adagio , while a Clementi square piano of 1832 is used to reveal the new-found richness of tome in four works of Mendelssohn, with sustaining pedal and clear variety in each register, most notably in the Duetto , op. 38 no. 6 contrasting a thin and imploring treble melody with a rich and comforting tenor.

It would have been fascinating to hear more contemporaneous English repertoire on these instruments – or, rather works composed in England, from Handel to J C Bach, Clementi, Cramer and Field – and there is great scope for further releases which might encompass a selection of works by composers of the London Pianoforte School whose compositional style was so heavily influenced by the advances in piano manufacture in London during this period, and which contrasts in so many ways to the developments in Vienna and Paris.

The recording is beautifully judged throughout, very close and capturing the finest of nuances. Leach's performances are first-rate, stylish and alert, with impeccably pointed ornaments. She relishes the colours available, most memorably in Mozart's B minor Adagio , K540, in which the constant dynamic changes and sf accents are all the more vivid on an instrument as fragile and varied as this.

The booklet notes by Andrew Lancaster are very informative, complemented by colour photographs of each instrument. Highly recommended: domestic instruments they may be, but they are of a quality and character which is remarkable to hear.
Nicholas Salwey

NEW CLASSICS:
Period-instrument specialist Joanna Leach takes us on a journey through the development of keyboard instruments used in wealthy homes, from a spinet through three square pianos, each instrument being contemporary with the music played. The four instruments on this disc span a period of just over one hundred years. It was a century which saw huge change in the tone of keyboard instruments from the then familiar sound of the harpsichord and spinet to the new and
exotic timbre of the fortepiano. The instruments chosen are typical domestic instruments of the period. While the harpsichord, and later the grand piano was to be found in theatres, assembly rooms or larger houses, the spinet and the square piano were designed for a more ordinary domestic setting - though, due to the expense, they would be found only in rather upmarket homes. The music is by Couperin (Les Barricades Mystérieuses, Les Folies Françaises), Byrd (Pavan - The Earle of Salisbury), Handel (including his Toccata in G minor), J. S. Bach, Soler, Mozart (Adagio in B minor), Schubert (Six Dances) and Mendelssohn (including two Venetian Gondola Songs). This unique recital of elegantly played music vividly brings to life the sounds of another age.
Unnamed reviewer

MIDWEST RECORD:
A thoroughly enjoyable album that probably should have been an audio video package but finds Leach playing for the clear joy of it using the journey through the past as a pretense to kick it out period style on pieces she enjoys.  A tasty work with a nice concept as it adds an authenticity to the work, this gives you the chance to hear Mendelssohn, Mozart, Bach, Handel and others as they might have been heard in their time.
Chris Spector

GRAMOPHONE:
Joanna Leach devotes 15 tracks to a 1727 spinet by Thomas Barton, five to a 1787 Longman & Broderip square piano, nine to an 1823 Stodart square, and five to an 1832 Clementi square. It is very much a matter of taste, but personally I find the spinet the most rewarding to hear because it isn't trying to sound like a pianoforte and failing. If square pianos were ever any good, they would still be manufactured today, mass-produced in some factory in South Korea. On the other hand, there is no denying the pleasure of experiencing the music of Mozart, Handel and Schubert in a domestic setting and as it would have been heard in the instruments of the day. All four instruments are pitched at 415Hz with the result that everything sounds a semitone lower than written – so Soler's Sonata no. 84 in heard in D flat major, Mendelssohn's Venetian Gondola Song op. 30 no. 6 in F minor, and so on.

Joanna Leach's playing is intimate, stylish and pleasantly unassuming. Among the many incidental delights are a very rare appearance on disc of Handel's Fantasia in C, G60, and, in his Air and Variations from Suite no. 1 from the Second Book of Suites (the one Brahms used for his Variations), the sound of Longman & Broderip's lute stop. But I shall always prefer my Schubert and Mendelssohn on the more expressive grand piano, for here it is hard to tell the difference between a Clementi square and a honky-tonk piano in a saloon bar.
Jeremy Nicholas