Nanette G. Lunde has produced a cauliflowered-sized diamond of a recording. Complete Seventeenth-Century French Unmeasured Preludes, with two discs and nearly seventy individual pieces, is as vast and unwieldy as the title suggests. Yet the playing is so satisfying, the instrument's tone so clear, and the engineering so outstanding that I find the release to be among the very best recent recordings of solo harpsichord.

The reason for this project, the neglected unmeasured prelude (a modern label-the works were originally simply preludes) is to these ears a close cousin of the toccata and the fantasy. These preludes wander between the composed and the improvised, and constantly and gracefully change key, motif, and apparent measure. It is this mutability that causes the listener to be engaged by, and ultimately lost in, the expansive two hours of music. I would have been grateful for an interlude of strictly measured music.

This disc's greatest achievement is how closely it reproduces the experience of being close to a harpsichord, without giving the grating feeling of being in one. Naturally, even the perfect microphone would be wasted on a poor performance. Lunde is worthy of any recording device. At once crystalline and fluid, her playing is adoring of both instrument and composition. Listening a dozen times to parts of or all of the disc has not diminished the interest of the music, nor the pleasure that it gives.

-Kate Grossman