Jean Rondeau, Harpsichord

Part of our Performances Up Close series, audience is seated onstage alongside the musicians in an hour-long program.

Whatever your preconceptions of the harpsichord may be, Jean Rondeau will undoubtedly shatter them all as he takes us to Parnassus, the mythological mountain home of the Muses. Leading the charge of a new generation of keyboardists (including as a founding member of the Jupiter Ensemble, which made a rousing debut in our 2022-23 season), he makes his inaugural PUC appearance with a program exploring the stunning range of the harpsichord. Through works spanning the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—much of it originally written for the piano—this “champion of his instrument” (Le Temps) asks us to consider what piano repertoire might illuminate about the harpsichord, and what the harpsichord might reveal about music composed for the piano. As he explains is, “my idea was never to take some piano pieces and find a way to make them work on the harpsichord…my idea was more to build something around musical languages which are common to both instruments.” Sit onstage with this trailblazing artist as you get to know this music and this instrument in a completely new way.