“Music only truly exists in the moment of being played and needs to be incarnated by a living being to exist in its full form. For me, any music that is being played live today is new.”
- Lillian Gordis in conversation with Lou Fancher
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“At this point, I am focused on removing limits and barriers, both with the instrument itself and its dynamic capacities for projection, and with how people view it.”
- Lillian Gordis in conversation with Parker Ramsay
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“We’ll wait because her touch is so gentle and relaxed […] an album definitely worth listening to. She chooses to play whatever she likes, and to make it beautiful in whatever time she apparently feels it needs […] She is not many years older than her harpsichord.”
- Bradley Lehman / American Record Guide
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Artistic Quality: 8, Sound Quality: 10
“…the gamut between spacey and rigorous.”
“I’ve rarely heard a harpsichord recording with such presence and bloom, resonant warmth, soaring bass lines, and timbral richness.”
- Jed Distler / Classics Today
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“Some charming playing here from California-born, Paris-based harpsichordist Lillian Gordis, and what’s perhaps even more special is how much it leaves one thinking. There’s a generous amount of chew and elasticity to the Partita No 1 in B flat that opens the first disc. Take the Allemande: Gordis plays with so much agogic sway that it’s as if the music has a wriggling life of its own. I particularly enjoy the care with which Gordis touches the low Gs in bars 28 and 29 – the non-alignment of these first beats is extremely sexy – and the harpsichord practically purrs in majesty.”
- Mark Seow / Gramophone
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“But the most surprising and mesmerising thing here is the narrative strength of this take on Bach’s work, and its joyful abandon of scholastic spirit. This recording truly reflects life: its strangeness, oddities and baroque tendencies as well as its zest, luminosity and abundance. Without doubt, this is well worth a listen.” [ENGLISH]
“Mais ce qui, surtout, surprend comme envoûte ici, c’est la force narrative de ce Bach, qui abandonne toute forme d’esprit scholastique. C’est la vie, avec ses étrangetés, ses bizarreries, ses tentations absolument baroques, et aussi sa joie de vivre, sa luminosité, sa plénitude presque zen. A découvrir sans tarder.” [FRANÇAIS]
- Pierre-Yves Lascar
“Gordis’s distinctive and sensitive technique brings into relief the strange mixture of sonorities, variety, monotony and violence of Scarlatti’s sonatas by drawing on numerous performance traditions. Every sonata challenges the image of the harpsichord, and of Scarlatti, as facile, virtuosic and digital, instead proving that colour, contrast and dynamics are indeed idiomatic to the harpsichord — she reveals a world of technical tools, musical effects and timbres that have rarely been explored.”
- Saraswathi Shukla
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