Couperin: The Complete Pieces de Clavecin, Vol. 1 / Kroll
Centaur Records
CD
$18.99Nov 11, 2016
This new release is the first volume in a projected cycle of the complete keyboard works of Francois Couperin, which will eventually comprise approximately twelve releases. For the entirety of this series, special attention is and will be given to the selection of appropriate historical harpsichords. French Baroque composer, organist, and harpsichordist Francois Couperin, he was known to many as Couperin le Grand (“Couperin the Great”) in order to distinguish him from other members of his musically talented family. Heavily influenced by the works of Corelli, he blends together Italian and French styles in much of his music. Harpsichordist Mark Kroll has long been a strong advocate of Couperin’s keyboard literature, and here shows his knowledge and expertise in this music’s interpretation.
Francois Couperin was one of the finest French Baroque composers and keyboardists. In fact, he was known as “Couperin the Great” to distinguish him from the rest of his talented Couperin family. This release features some of Couperin’s finest works, including Huitieme Concert “Dans le gout Theatral,” and “Les Ondes.” All works on this recording are performed on period instruments by the acclaimed Aulos Ensemble.
Couperin: The Complete Pièces de Clavecin, Vol. 10
Centaur Records
CD
$17.99Mar 05, 2021
This is Volume 10 in Centaur's complete traversal of the keyboard works of Francois Couperin, performed by Mark Kroll. This is a landmark edition of these complete works. Mark Kroll has made a specialty of Couperin throughout his long and distinguished career. Mark Kroll has performed on four continents as a harpsichordist and fortepianist, in both solo recital and as a collaborative chamber musician. Highlights include an appearance as the official guest of the city of Barcelona; featured soloist in Germany's Regensburg Early Music Festival, France's Festival Ambronay and the Bordeaux Hummel Festival; two concerts for the Czech Republic's Prague Spring Festival; and recitals at Lisbon's Gulbenkian Foundation, Rome's Conservatorio Santa Caecilia and Associazione Musicale Romana, Poland's Dni Bachowski, and Slovenija's Radovljica Festival.
La Raphaele: The Art of Francois Couperin / Lindorff
Affetto Records
CD
$18.99Jun 01, 2018
This release, La Raphaèle: The Art of François Couperin, pays homage to the Italian keyboard master long venerated by the Parisian Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture. This reverence also rang true of François Couperin as a musical creator, who was clearly struck by Raphael's art, and so named the first movement of his Huitième Ordre's majestic opening allemande after the artist. World-renowned harpsichordist Joyce Lindorff recreates Couperin's L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, Sixième Ordre, and Huitième Ordre with exquisite musicianship honed over four decades of researching and studying the styles and methods of the most famous keyboard composers of the 17th through 18th centuries. She is Professor of Keyboard Studies at Temple University where she has taught historical keyboards and performance practice for the past twenty years. In addition to teaching, she has performed across the United States, Europe, Russia, Japan, and China, and has received solo recitalist awards from the Pro Musicis Foundation of France and the National Endowment for the Arts in the United States.
Franois Couperin’s Concerts Royaux (1722) and Les Nations (1726) use open scoring, indicating that they could be performed by whatever instruments were at hand. + He later confessed that he himself preferred to perform them on two harpsichords. + This suggestion had to wait for these two CDs to be taken up in a recording (the second CD is being readied for future release). + Also presented are a number of his Pices de clavecin, also in rarely heard realizations for two harpsichords.
Nowadays, the work of François Couperin is commonly associated with harpsichord music of the turn of the Baroque and Classicism. His elaborate miniatures and suites, plenty of brilliant ornaments, are now almost inextricably linked to the canonical harpsichord repertoire. The album by Dorota Cybulska-Amsler makes us aware, however, that François was not the only composer in the Couperin family. As the artist points out, names of members of the Couperin family, originating from the Chaumes-en-Brie region, are already in documents from the 16th century. In 1586, Mathurin Couperin (ca. 1569–ca. 1640), is still making a living mainly from farming, but he obtains the right to practice music for remuneration. His son, Charles I (1595–1654) is going to be the founder of a musical dynasty.
This is Volume 7 in Centaur's ongoing series of the complete keyboard works of Francois Couperin, performed on harpsichord by Mark Kroll. Mark Kroll has performed Couperin's works throughout his performing life, and it shows in these wonderful recordings. Mark Kroll has been acclaimed as one of the world's leading harpsichordists and fortepianists. During a career spanning more than fifty years, he has appeared as a recitalist, concerto soloist, and chamber musician on four continents, winning critical praise for his expressive playing and virtuosity. He has played under the batons of conductors such as Seiji Ozawa, Sir Simon Rattle, James Levine, Kurt Masur, Sir Colin Davis and Charles Dutoit, and served as harpsichordist for the Boston Symphony since 1979.
If the cherished corpus of Pièces de Violes by François Couperin Le Grand, the celebrated organist of the Chapelle Royale de Versailles, constitutes a major contribution to the viol repertoire in France at the beginning of the 18th century, this unique volume published in Paris in 1728 is also shrouded in mystery for any musician who might wish to immerse himself in these sumptuous pieces. Might they have been composed for an exceptional performer, Marin Marais or Antoine Forqueray, Couperin's colleagues at the Court of Louis XIV? Arranged in two suites of splendid pieces, blending Italian and French styles, they represent all the spirit and finesse of the music of the King's Chamber at it's apogee. Accompanied by the finest French musicians, Mathilde Vialle divinely plays her viol, in turn both devilish and sweet-toned, intense and acute, virtuoso and sensitive, and through such outstanding portraits of the human soul, brings the spirit of Versailles to life by exalting it
Following on the success of their widely acclaimed Music & Arts release J.S. Bach: Sonatas for Flute and Harpsichord, Stephen Schultz (Baroque flute) and Jory Vinikour (harpsichord) are joined by Alexa Haynes-Pilon (viola da gamba), and Mindy Rosenfeld (Baroque flute) in superlative performances of François Couperin’s four Concerts Royaux; works which stand among the pinnacles of the Golden Age that was French music during the reign of Louis XIV. This state-of-the-art recording was produced and engineered at Skywalker Sound by two-time Grammy Award winner Jack Vad (2012, 2021).
REVIEWS:
This set is essential for its simple grace. The annotator, Gonzalo Ruiz (an excellent oboist who doesn’t play here), explains King Louis XIV’s restrictions on sharing this royal court music until he was old. He allowed it to be published just before he died, but Couperin had composed it many years earlier. There are four suites. Couperin didn’t specify the instrumentation for this chamber music beyond some general suggestions. Ensembles make their own arrangements to suit their personnel and strengths...Anything with theorbo or archlute usually pleases me with a satisfying low-bass crunch. But there is nothing wrong with this more sparing arrangement or performance by the Schultz team.
Some of the pieces are played entirely by Vinikour as harpsichord solos, or with his harpsichord starting them and other players soon joining in. Haynes-Pilon sometimes plays the bass line with her viol, sometimes up in the violin range. The two wooden flutes have beautifully pure tone, and Schultz and Rosenfeld phrase gracefully with them. The pieces sound splendid here as elegant and lightweight entertainment, of the kind that would soothe a stressed king and please his guests. It’s not too fast (like Musica ad Rhenum’s) or too stern (like Rousset’s), but just right.
Frédérick Haas writes: "Couperin is one of the three or four greatest composers to have devoted themselves completely to the harpsichord. He is the greatest poet of all. Returning to Couperin under the protective auspices of the Royaumont Foundation was pure happiness. It is like returning to the beloved places of a blissful childhood - but in the meantime the taste, the discernment has been refined. To play it with the fabulous Hemsch of 1751 seems to me an ever more miraculous experience." Frédérick Haas began playing harpsichord at the age of 12. He was awarded solo diplomas at both the Sweelinck Conservatorium of Amsterdam and the Conservatoire Royal de Bruxelles, in addition to a Musicology degree from the Sorbonne. He is professor of harpsichord at the Royal Conservatorium of Brussels.
Couperin: The Complete Pieces De Clavecin, Vol. 9 / Mark Kroll
Centaur Records
CD
$17.99Oct 16, 2020
This is volume 9 in Centaur's traversal of the Complete keyboard works of Couperin, performed on harpsichord by Mark Kroll. Mark Kroll has performed Couperin's works throughout his long performing life. He has performed on four continents as a harpsichordist and fortepianist, in both solo recital and as a collaborative chamber musician. Highlights include an appearance as the official guest of the city of Barcelona; featured soloist in Germany’s Regensburg Early Music Festival, France’s Festival Ambronay and the Bordeaux Hummel Festival; performances and lectures in Beijing and Shanghai; two concerts for the Czech Republic’s Prague Spring Festival; and recitals at Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Foundation, Rome’s Conservatorio Santa Caecilia and Associazione Musicale Romana, Poland’s Dni Bachowski, and Slovenija’s Radovljica Festival. Mark Kroll has been one of the few harpsichordists to devote a significant part of his career to the contemporary literature for the instrument. He has commissioned and premiered a large number of works, and released several recordings of this repertoire.
Couperin: Complete Solo Harpsichord Music / Mahúgo
Brilliant Classics
CD
$8.99$17.99Save 50%Aug 27, 2021
Towards the end of the renowned Couperin dynasty, Armand-Louis was born in 1727 as the nephew of François Couperin (‘le grand’), and in due course he became titulaire organist at the Église Saint-Gervais in the Marais district of Paris, as generations of Couperins in a continuous sequence stretching back to 1653. In 1752 he married Elisabeth-Antoinette Blanchet, daughter of the harpsichord-maker François-Étienne Blanchet and herself the third generation of a family of musicians and luthiers. They had four children, three of whom lived to maturity and became musicians, including their son Pierre, who succeeded Armand-Louis at Saint- Gervais after a tragic accident with a runaway horse brought about the composer’s premature end in 1789. It has been suggested that personal modesty, as well as the demands of a schedule which saw him in demand at churches across Paris, was the cause of Armand-Louis publishing so little of his music. Certainly it was highly esteemed during his lifetime. These Pièces de Clavecin were published in 1751 as his ‘Opus 1’ and succeeded only by lesser-known collections of violin sonatas and trios. The Pièces de clavecin deserve consideration alongside the viol fantazias of Purcell and the Lachrymae of Dowland for their rich, saturated exploitation of an idiom passed its high noon. The collection is divided into two parts by key, G major/minor and B flat major/minor. The titles allude to friends and well-known figures of the time, and much is lost or rather buried within and between the notes in this kind of portraiture, yet the pieces spring to life in the right hands.
Pierre Gallon and Matthieu Boutineau offer us an opportunity to rediscover Couperin's Concerts Royaux in a version for two harpsichords, a rare combination, yet one of which the composer to the Sun King was especially fond. Here is an interpretation at once brilliant and moving of these works full of tenderness, gaiety and invention, a veritable stylistic turning point between the twilight of the Grand Siecle and the dawn of the Enlightenment.
Monsieur Couperin: Pieces De Clavecin / Brice Sailly
Ricercar
CD
$20.99Feb 12, 2021
Careful examination of the manuscript sources of the harpsichord pieces of the ancestors of Francois Couperin ‘Le Grand’ reveals that nowhere are these compositions indisputably attributed to one of the three brothers Louis, Francois and Charles, born in Chaumes-en-Brie in 1626, 1630 and 1638. In these sources, the signatures mention an enigmatic ‘Monsieur Couperin’. The question of the authorship of all these compositions thus remains open. What is certain is that, for various reasons, Louis, who died in 1661, cannot under any circumstances be the composer of all the pieces in the corpus generally attributed to him. Which pieces can be restored to Charles and perhaps Francois, who died in 1679 and 1701 respectively? It is this riddle, worthy of a detective story, that this recording attempts to solve...
The ensemble is composed by one or two recorders (or flutes), continuo, and other additional instruments with the common aim to focus on the repertoire of the flute (both soloist and in chamber formation) during the XVII and the XVIII Centuries. The musical philology and the original performing practice are essential for a real comprehension of the early and baroque music and it is the basis to put in touch this repertoire with the sensibility of nowadays, in a sort of ideal reconciliation between the spirit of “Les Anciens” and of “Les Modernes”. On this new release they present Couperin’s Les Concerts Royaux. The focus on the recorder in this interpretation sets this album aside from other recordings of this work.
