Mishka Rushdie Momen: Reformation album review

(Hyperion)
The British pianist plays 16th-century keyboard works on a modern grand, making them feel fresh and new with a virtuosic light touch

The music of the English Reformation on a modern Steinway grand? The choice of music here by the rising UK pianist Mishka Rushdie Momen might be unexpected but it’s not unprecedented – Glenn Gould used to say that Orlando Gibbons, not JS Bach, was his favourite composer. Rushdie Momen’s selection includes music by Gibbons, Byrd, Bull and their Dutch counterpart Sweelinck – fantasias and dances that might have been played on harpsichord or organ. Several of them riff on existing pieces such as Dowland’s Flow, My Tears, or on familiar songs of the time, including three that are referenced by characters in Shakespeare’s plays; he, Bull and Byrd were at one point near neighbours in London.

Rushdie Momen uses the piano’s soft and sustaining pedals, but sparingly, and her unfussy performances are quietly beguiling. What is striking is how modern much of the music seems – how much shorter the distance between this and the baroque style that followed; there are passages in Byrd’s Fantasia BK13 that sound almost classical. Rushdie Momen is virtuosic in the dense variations of Bull’s Walsingham, introspective in Gibbons’s darkly beautiful Lord Salisbury Pavan, and always weaving the music through with fine-spun threads of trills and embellishments, lightly worn. It’s beautifully done.