Close your eyes, and try to imagine: 300 years ago, in a very dark, forbidding church, the service goes on and on. Fifteen candles are extinguished, one by one, at the closing of each psalm. Shadows enfold the congregation, and in the midst of this eerie backdrop, two high voices sing their lament. The music is solemn, pure, and deeply moving.


Beautiful? Most certainly. But also very distant from our own busy, frivolous reality.


Unlike a lot of the Baroque repertoire, these are pieces that require getting used to, or at least the willingness to spend some tranquil time immersed in a world of devotion. So be prepared: this is not music that grabs you right away, that makes you feel like singing or dancing. But for all who need to pray (religiousness aside!), this might be just the right Easter gift (the careful production by BIS is an added bonus: excellent liner notes by Jean-Paul Vachon, sound engineering that effectively captures the aural atmosphere of a church, and apt graphic design).


Originally, the Tenebrae lessons for the Holy Week were intended to arouse feelings of the deepest contrition. Held in the middle of the night (at around 3 :00 am), when darkness was complete (hence the Tenebrae ), the lessons were sung to very sad texts attributed to the prophet Jeremiah, as part of a mass performed with great dramatic flair, including the flickering light of candles which were then put out, symbolizing Jesus?s abandonment by his apostles. But humanity is mundane, of course. Little by little, the ceremony gained more earthly overtones. First, it was held at a more convenient time?in the afternoon. Then it became a showcase for the famous singers of the day, who could thus show off their piousness (and their beautiful tone!) to a very large audience.


In the 18th century, many important composers wrote versions of Leçons . Couperin´s remaining three pieces (of a group of nine) are the best known nowadays, and with good reason. In the intimate setting of a chamber work, Couperin achieves what a more grandiose-minded composer might not have: to convey true solitude, true repentance, and true sorrow.


For a long time, Couperin?s Leçons de ténèbres remained the province of the aficionado. In the past decades, however, they seem to have gained a surprising popularity, and some beautiful recordings have come to light, including excellent ones by Gerard Lesne/Steve Dugardin and James Bowman/Michael Chance, which, as in the present version by Theatre of Early Music, also resort to the unusual voices of two countertenors (normally, the leçons are sung by two sopranos). The advantage: a darker tone, sweeter and less lyrical, without the sharper edge we find so often in women?s voices. This, in itself, would be a point of interest. Notwithstanding the tough competition, the Theatre of Early Music holds its own, and manages to create a very moving rendering of the work, as well as of the sublime Magnificat included in the package. Both singers are first-rate, and although their individuality is always retained, their voices blend beautifully. Blaze and Taylor show their intimacy with the style?no mechanical vibrato here, or extravagant feats of virtuosity. They sing with simplicity and fluency, and with an austerity that fits the text without ever becoming frigid. The accompanying instrumentalists are equally masterful and discreet, each calmly serving the music.


For a long time, theologians spent their days discussing the sex of the angels. After hearing this CD, I am inclined to agree with those who held that heavenly creatures must have been male.


FANFARE: Laura Rónai

This reverie offered by Brice Sailly in homage to François Couperin is presented in the guise of a trip to Arcadia, that utopian land which lies hidden in the heart of European geography. The selected harpsichord pieces, most of them evoking childhood and the birth of love, sit beside excerpts from the Concerts royaux that set the scene rather as Watteau might have done, leaving to the less well-known airs de cour the task of describing sentiments in words. Couperin discreetly whispers the most luminous of truths. Here all is benevolence, a smile on the lips, a light heart, and melancholy is gently dismissed in favor of consolation. Open to various musical activities, Brice Sailly is a member and founder of the Franco-Icelandic group Susser Trost and has done projects with many artists, from early music specialists to musicians of the electronic music scene.

“The harpsichord is perfect in its compass, and brilliant in itself; but, as one can neither swell nor diminish its notes, I shall always be grateful to those who, through consummate art sustained by good taste, manage to make this instrument capable of expression.” Why is it difficult to play the music of Francois Couperin when it seems so simple at first glance? By offering precious information on the interpretation of his music (and more generally on the interpretation of French music of his time) in his treatise L’Art de toucher le clavecin (The art of harpsichord playing), Couperin provides us with the necessary elements for today’s performer, who seeks above all to respect the composer’s intentions. However, fear of not going beyond the indications given by the latter and excessive attention to every detail can inhibit inspiration and distract from the purpose of the works. Like the French language, it consists of rules but also of many exceptions. Modern grammars and dictionaries give us complete, firm, infallible answers to all these questions. But things were quite different at the time. Canadian harpsichordist Olivier Fortin has chosen this music for his new release. Olivier Fortin is founder (1996) and director of the Montreal-based early music Ensemble Masques. He is increasingly esteemed as a soloist and chamber musician, touring and recording throughout Europe, the United States and Canada with ensembles such as Ensemble Masques, Capriccio Stravagante, Tafelmusik, Chanticleer, the Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal and Les Voix Humaines as well as playing with Skip Sempé and Pierre Hantaï in a harpsichord trio.

After the success of its CD devoted to the Sonatas of Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, Florence Malgoire's ensemble Les Dominos now explores the first French sonatas. All of these works date from the 1680s, the time when the French had just discovered the Italian sonata style and had begun to use it, albeit in some secrecy. This recording contains the complete sonatas of François Couperin, four of which are the original versions of sonatas that Couperin would later make use of in Les Nations. This is the first recording to present the sonatas in their entirety, in particular because the sonata La Convalescente is here recorded for the very first time; this sonata was discovered only recently in a manuscript copy in Germany.

Armand-Louis Couperin was the nephew of François Couperin, and part of a family which was the dominant musical dynasty in France for around two hundred and fifty years. The music of the younger Couperin is difficult to categorize, since he was writing at a time between the decorative aesthetic of the high baroque and the beginning of the true classical style. Sophie Yates relishes the music of this period, for to her, contained in the rococo period are the elements of the baroque, classical and even romantic styles in embryo, making, she says, 'a rich and unpredictable mixture of delights.'

François Couperin (1668-1733) published his first book of Pièces de Clavecin-containing five suites or, as he called them, Ordres, for harpsichord-in 1713. This was followed by his harpsichord method L'Art de toucher le Clavecin in 1716, and a second book of harpsichord pieces in 1717 (two more books followed in 1722 and 1730). L'Art de toucher le Clavecin in a way ties the first two books of Pièces de Clavecin together, as it includes eight Préludes for some of their suites. While we still do encounter traditional dance movements in these Ordres, they are interspersed with characterful, poetic and brilliantly creative compositions with (often whimsical) character titles. Some of these titles represent an idea Couperin had in mind when composing the piece. Others are portraits of living persons, known to his contemporaries. This release presents selections from three Ordres from the first and second books of Pièces de Clavecin, each preceded by the matching Prélude from L'Art de toucher le Clavecin in the same key. The Premier Prélude in C major is a sunny, carefree piece in which Couperin exploits his signature style luthé, where the bass note provides the beat, or cadence, and the upper voices fill in the chord in an arpeggiation. The gloomy Troisiême Ordre in C minor is a reflection on the French court's devastating year of 1712, when three Dauphins died in short succession. The selection presented here contains several pieces written in the tradition of the musical Tombeau, although not titled as such.

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.

Pianist Luisa Imorde has a pattern in her releases: she frequently juxtaposes the repertoire of two composers. On her well received last album she presented works by Bach and Kapustin. Her newest release "Polychromie" contrasts the preludes by Couperin with pieces from Messiaen, pointing out the variety of colors within the music of these two different epochs. "Luisa Imorde couples a mature playing technique with an unbridled passion for the piece she is playing and the instrument she is playing it on, resulting in an auditory experience that kindles the spirit and sets the heart aflame" – said the Süddeutsche Zeitung of the young German pianist’s art.

To the Couperin dynasty we owe the success of music for harpsichord. The figure of Louis languished in obscurity over many years and only recently, through musicological research, it has been possible to recognize his genius. The story differs with François the Great, the leading member of the dynasty, whose compositional style revolves around his own sentence: “I confess that I far prefer what moves me to what surprises me.” Luigi Chiarizia is a harpsichordist, organist and composer. Born from generations of artists, he began studying music at the age of six, studying first with the masters Rendine, Nenna, Herrera, and Carnini, later with Mencoboni, Suzzani and Pappagallo. He graduated with honors in organ and organ composition in Pescara.

Although Couperin is best known today as a composer of harpsichord music, he remained deeply involved in chamber music throughout his career. Les Nations is a vast project in which the virtues of both the French and Italian styles are set next to each other. Each of the four ordres celebrates a Catholic power of Europe – France, Spain, the Holy Roman Empire, and the Savoy dynasty of Piedmont – and each is a combination of an Italianate trio sonata, with its free-form virtuosity, and a large-scale and elaborate French dance suite. Juilliard Baroque brings together some of the world’s most respected and accomplished early music instrumentalists for this invigorating program.

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Review:

All eight players are totally absorbed in the style. Their often dense ornamentation never sounds calculated or contrived; their rhythmic flow in slower movements has a captivating insouciance, relaxed, gently fluid. This is French playing that would be hard to better.

– BBC Music Magazine

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.

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...

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.

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

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.