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.

Franois 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 Pices 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.

Classical Music

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.

-- American Record Guide

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.

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.

Classical Music

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.

Harpsichord friends had to wait a long time for this fourth album and the conclusion of the complete harpsichord works of Louis Couperin (a fifth organ volume is still in preparation). On the fantastic original “Velen” Ruckers harpsichord, recorded in a church on the Lower Rhine, Bob van Aspern shows with his inimitably flexible and colorful playing why this repertoire is so loved by connoisseurs. The musical proximity to Johann Jacob Froberger and the Parisian colleagues is not only to be heard, but also described and elucidated by Bob van Aspern in the as always comprehensive booklet – even several works by Parisian “guest composers” are included as in the previous volumes.

Classical Music

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.

This is Volume 8 in Centaur's recording of the complete Pieces de Clavecin of Francois Couperin, performed on harpsichord by Mark Kroll. This cycle, gradually nearing its completion, will be a landmark in recordings of works by Couperin, one of the greatest French composers of the Baroque period. 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; 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.

Two-time Grammy Award-nominated harpsichordist Jory Vinikour plays historically groundbreaking works by François Couperin (1668–1733) on an album comprising three inventive Couperin suites — the composer called them “Ordres” — combining traditional French Baroque dance movements with witty and atmospheric character pieces — miniature tone poems for solo harpsichord. Couperin’s suites “are elegantly composed, concealing a complex, allusive and varied emotional world behind their highly wrought surface” (Norton Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music). Chicago-born, French-trained harpsichordist Vinikour is especially enamored of Couperin’s Ordres Nos. 6, 7, and 8, calling them “remarkable” for their harmonically driven melodic invention and atmospheric unity within each suite. Highlights include the celebrated Les Baricades Mistérieuses from Ordre No. 6, which England’s The Guardian calls “shimmering, kaleidoscopic and seductive, a sonic trompe l’oeil.” The compelling Les Amusemens from Ordre No. 7 is irresistibly sweet and melancholic. Order No. 8 offers masterful examples of established forms, culminating with a dramatic Passacaille.

REVIEWS:

L’Unique presents all the wit and melancholy of Vinikour’s distinctive interpretations of the sixth, seventh, and eighth suites.

– BBC Radio 3 Record Review Extra

Playfully and decorously brought music to life by American harpsichordist Jory Vinikour. The recording places the instrument in a really lifelike perspective.

– BBC Record Review

Louis XIV enjoyed holding private concerts for himself, performed by the musicians in his service. In 1714, François Couperin composed an ensemble of short pieces for this very purpose, brought together in four Concerts, each one a marvel of the King’s Chamber Music. By turns dancing or mysterious, the pieces by Couperin, who presided over the harpsichord during these musical moments in the twilight years of the Sun King’s reign, form a veritable compendium of Grand Siècle music. They dazzle like never before at the hands of Patrick Cohën-Akenine and his Folies Françoises…

This release features Ravel's works alongside pieces from composers who inspired him, including Chabrier, Haydn, Borodine, Couperin, and more. Marina Baranova seamlessly blends classical and neoclassical elements, creating a unique musical language that is distinctly her own. Each track invites you to appreciate the dialogue between these great composers, showcasing Baranova's exceptional talent and interpretative skills.

Artistic salons had begun thriving in Paris at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Their history started in the early seventeenth century with Madame de Rambouillet’s Chambre bleue, which offered its regulars a lively exchange of views on current events in politics, the arts and science, while also serving as a venue for conversations on “love, friendship, a sense of duty, reputation, virtue and taste.” Music was an inseparable element of salon life. It was performed by both high-caliber artists and amateurs, and was the subject of heated debates, controversies and polemics. A gradual return of life to Paris, and the fresh breath of freedom that characterized the final years of the reign of Louis XIV and the ensuing period of regency in particular had created an environment, in which French composers opened themselves up to the music of various nations. The present release features chamber works by Jean-Fery Rebel, Antoine Forqueray, Louis-Antoine Dornel, and Francois Couperin, performed by the {oh!} trio.

“Blue stands for a particularly intimate mood,” says renowned Spanish guitarist Pablo Sainz-Villegas. And correspondingly his latest album is titled The Blue Album, which will be released by Sony Classical on 9 June 2023. “Blue symbolizes a mysterious intermediary realm: one thinks of the moment when the sun rises and night slowly withdraws,” Pablo Sainz-Villegas goes on to explain. These are exceptional moments, moments between silence and waking, between heaven and earth, between light and darkness. These are also the moments that spirit us away from the hectic routine of our everyday lives and that create an atmosphere of reverie and relaxation, allowing us time to slow down. All of this is reflected in Pablo Sainz-Villegas’s new programme. Few composers have captured this mood so unmistakably in their music as the French composer Erik Satie, who is represented here by selections from his Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes. Debussy’s “Clair de lune” and “La fille aux cheveux de lin” are almost magical in their expressiveness: this is music that is filled with calm and with the power to enchant.

According to Pablo Sainz-Villegas, “this album brings together some of the most beautiful and most heartfelt melodies that have ever been written. All these pieces create a magical atmosphere, their colours create a mood, a mystery. The guitar whispers an invitation to the listener to explore and go to the most intimate part of your soul. It creates a moment to look inside and have a conversation with the essence of yourself. “ The repertory is correspondingly wide-ranging, extending, as it does, from the German and Italian Baroque – with music by Silvius Leopold Weiss and Domenico Scarlatti – to the present day with music by Philip Glass and Max Richter’s A Catalogue of Afternoons – which, as first single, is out today. Sainz-Villegas also undertakes a foray into the world of film music with the Cavatina from the classic film The Deer Hunter of 1978. And this release inevitably includes the international hit La Paloma, one of the most frequently performed and arranged pieces of the last 150 years. This Spanish work has come to embody the quintessential notion of longing.

Recorded in Willowhayne Records 10th anniversary year in 2022, St Albans Experience is the tenth in their Experience series. This recording showcases every facet of the magnificent Harrison & Harrison organ of St Albans Cathedral, in music from the Baroque era to contemporary works for the instrument. Central to this programme is Maurice Durufle's beautiful Prelude, Adagio et Choral Varie sur le Veni Creator, Op. 4. This recital includes several world premiere recordings, including Francis Pott's Laudes, Rhian Samuel's three-movement Ad Lucem, and two works by the late Peter Hurford - for twenty years Master of the Music at St Albans Cathedral, and the driving force behind this world-renowned instrument. Also included are works by Peter Dickinson and Anthony Gilbert, who passed away earlier in 2023, and to whose memory the recording is dedicated.

NEO - French Baroque Music and New Compositions brings together French Baroque music and modern compositions. The album includes works by Jean-Fery Rebel, Francois Couperin, and Marin Marais, along with new pieces by Calliope Tsoupaki, Willem Wander van Nieuwkerk, and Torben Klaes. Recorded in Burgundy, musicians Saskia Coolen, Patrick Ayrton, and Rainer Zipperling (viola da gamba) blend historical and modern styles.

Virtuoso extraordinaire Tatjana Vorobjova transports the listener to the sound world of the early 17th century with the celebrated 'Colmar-Ruckers' historic harpsichord built over 400 years ago. The programme traces the development of this instrument over the centuries with works by Froberger, d'Anglebert, Couperin, Buxtehude and Bach, providing a rich and vibrant portrait of this magnificent harpsichord.

ArcoDiva's newest release presents works for oboe performed by Martin Danek, a graduate of the prestigious Hanns Eisler University of Music in Berlin and winner of the 2019 Prague Spring International Competition. He says: "I've been living abroad for a long time, and playing in my own country is always something special", says Mr. Danek. "This is especially true in the case of Prague Spring, with it's festive atmosphere, which I remember from my childhood. The combinations of instruments and works on this program will be unusual, so it will be a unique experience for both the audience and the performers."

This latest MarchVivo release is a remastering of the concert given by Benjamin Alard at the Fundación Juan March on 1 February 2020 as part of a series entitled The Couperins at the harpsichord. The album focuses on the stylistic connections between different members of the most significant family in the history of the French Baroque: the Couperins. The harpsichord epitomized the intimacy and sophistication of salon music and, with the repertoire they composed for their instrument, the clavecinistes français helped forge a distinctive national style. This was renewed and enlivened by successive generations of the Couperin dynasty as they introduced innovative aspects of contemporary Italian style into their works, thereby creating an eloquent new idiom that was to have a lasting influence on the history of keyboard music.

Cellist Sophie Shao is a winner of the Avery Fisher Career Grant. She has been described by The New York Times as "eloquent and powerful." This is a beautiful program of great works from the past and the present, from Couperin to Chopin to Adès.

This live recording immortalizes Christophe Rousset's performance at the Fundacion Juan March in Madrid on January 8, 2025, a featured event in the Earning a Living concert series. Francois Couperin's keyboard compositions illuminate the role of royal patronage as the modus vivendi for musicians of the Early Modern period. Couperin's treatise, L'Art de Toucher le Clavecin, is here interwoven with a selection of his Pieces de clavecin, giving rise to a portrait gallery in music, each inspired by anonymous figures who inhabited the French court. This set of pieces de caractere, whose allusive and encoded meanings remain largely enigmatic today, is presented in groupings by tonality, each offering a window into the refined world of Baroque palace life and it's intricate web of connections.

The yamato word for mirror, kagami, can be read as “kami (divinity) surrounding ga (self)”: if you look in a mirror, what you see is your own self surrounded by divinity. Kaori Uemura has called her tale Kagami, because she believes that music reflects the inner depths of the self in the same way as a mirror. Mirrors were used in art as a reflection of what is, and as an allegory of truth and wisdom, a means of knowing yourself as you are. This recording is also a tribute to the Baroque composers who saw music not only as a mirror of divine creation, but equally as a means of expressing human emotions through musical figures which could produce specific affects.