Marcin Swietkiewicz, one of today’s leading harpsichordists, invites us to join him in the multifaceted and wondrous world of chromaticism on his latest CD. He performs repertoire from the seventeenth century on an Italian harpsichord by Detmar Hungerberg with fourteen keys per octave (split upper keys for d sharp and e flat and for g sharp and a flat) and in mean-tone temperament. The repertoire from the eighteenth century is heard on a two-manual copy after Johannes Ruckers by Christian Fuchs. The chromatic style is a special musical phenomenon. Already highly valued by the Greeks during antiquity, it was discovered for the modern world by Humanist scholars of antiquity during the Italian renaissance. Composers and theorists of the sixteenth century infused it with the spirit of the music of their epoch. Chromaticism flourished on the fertile ground of rhetorical polyphony of the seconda prattica at the same time and in the same place that generated the recitative, the opera, and a new homophony. With the repertoire selected for this CD Swietkiewicz intends to illustrate the phenomenon of chromatic music in the greatest possible number of geographical and historical contexts.