Performers and listeners alike have long gravitated to Louis Couperin's music more than to that of any other member of the French keyboard school of the time, probably because of its fascinating and surprising harmonic language. There are 129 pieces catalogued as authentic.

In making this new recording of all 129 pieces, Massimo Berghella has chosen to take the Preludes as starting points for ‘suites’ – 17 in all – which gather up the remaining dance movements into coherent sequences cast in the same key as the relevant Prelude.

Among the most distinguished active Italian harpsichordists, Massimo Bergella studied with Kenneth Gilbert at the Mozarteum in Salzburg and at the Accademia Chigiana in Siena. He has a 30-year-long career as a teacher himself, as well as a performance diary and discography that has taken him across Europe for recitals, broadcasts and recordings. Of a previous album of d’Anglebert, La Nazione remarked that Berghella ‘grasps the reconstructive necessity of the scores, performing them in all their poetic complexity.’

“The project is inspired by the moment before the realization of something that drastically changes your life, the moment of just being, existing in the moment. That moment in time is free and full, mindfulness-ish and unaffected by misery, sorrow, regret, shame, anxiety and depression. In my mind it is bright and has a sense of nostalgia. The title also refers to a daily tradition on Icelandic radio Ra´s 1, where a song, “last song before the news” would be played just before the news hour at noon. The song would typically be an Icelandic one, sometimes a lullaby, a love song or an ode to scary and gorgeous nature. Or an Icelandic traditional, sometimes an Italian canzone or a Scandinavian sorrow. Jo´runn Viðar’s piece Icelandic Suite sums up all these elements, a piece written for the 2000 years anniversary of inhabitation in Iceland in 1974. The lightness and the longing are with us throughout the program except in the title piece of mine, Last Song before the News, where apocalyptic visions are awfully obvious and take over early on. The album is dedicated to my father, Sveinbjorn Rafnsson, whose lightness and passion for music, poetry and history along with his sense of humor has been a lifeline to many people.” (Una Sveinbjarnardottir)

REVIEW:

The chief attraction of this disc is to be found in the program. There is so much interesting music for the adventurous listener to discover that I can recommend this CD on those grounds. The performances of those works are more engaging.

-- Fanfare

Bob van Asperen and AEOLUS have now realized the third volume of the Louis Couperin Edition. The valuable harpsichord from the Villa Medici in Rome has been recorded here for the first time in high resolution and with Surround-Sound technology. The Super Audio CD contains some of the wonderful harpsichord suites composed by Louis Couperin (an uncle of François Couperin), who lived in Paris in the 17th century. The album's title, 'Chaconne de Mr Couperin', refers to the genre of the chaconne, which is characteristic - together with the related genre of the passacaille - of Couperin's work. The thick booklet even provides the score of a recently discovered piece by Couperin. The Couperin Edition will be made up of four volumes of harpsichord alone, and additionally offer the composer's other preserved and seldom heard works.

Following on from the success of the Red and Yellow series (a total of twenty-eight reissues), which have restored to the limelight the treasures of the label’s Baroque music catalogues, here are fourteen new titles offering a chance to renew acquaintance with further gems of the Baroque as well as a number of rarities. This third series also expands to embrace the Classical repertory (Mozart, Haydn etc.) and other cultures, notably those of the East, in recordings that form an integral part of Alpha’s identity and history. The fourteen reissues are performed by the leading musicians in the relevant repertory; most of these discs received one or more press distinctions on their first release. They are accompanied by full booklets, with articles in three languages (English, French, German) and richly illustrated chronologies. A wide range of photographers have provided the cover illustrations for the series, this time with the colour blue as the unifying thread.

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.

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 ever-inquisitive pianist Daniel-Ben Pienaar presents The Long 17th Century: A Cornucopia of Early Keyboard Music. The Long 17th Century refers to the period from the late 1500s to the early 1700s, an era noted for forward-thinking individuality and invention in all areas of life. This two-and-a-half hour recital surveys a pan-European variety of styles, genres and techniques, and comprises 36 works, each by a different composer, many not recorded before on a modern piano. Daniel-Ben Pienaar has been critically acclaimed for his previous albums on Avie: “a gloriously multi-faceted opus maximus ... Amazing and very much worth hearing” –Der Spiegel(on Beethoven’s Complete Piano Sonatas, AV2320) “dizzying virtuosity ... fresh, spontaneous, original readings that shed new light on the keyboard player’s Bible” –BBC Music Magazine (on J. S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, AV2299)



REVIEWS:

Have you noticed the growing trend of pianists taking up 17th-century keyboard works on the modern concert grand? Perhaps it has to do with the desire to be rebellious, or to attain a certain level of intellectual caché. Yet pianists also have valid artistic reasons to explore this repertoire. First and foremost are the sheer musical rewards. Secondly, the freedom one has in regard to phrasing, tempo, and embellishment can be liberating and creatively stimulating. For this remarkable two-disc collection, Daniel-Ben Pienaar has chosen 36 17th-century keyboard works, each by a different composer. He brilliantly reveals how a piano’s dynamic scope, timbral diversity, and sustaining capabilities can vividly and meaningfully serve this repertoire.

One noticeable example is in Tarquino Merula’s Capriccio cromatico, where the ascending legato chromatic lines and detaché counterline with repeated notes take on distinctive characters. The Weckmann D minor Canzon’s virtuosic repeated notes gain color and drama through pianistic inflection, and via Pienaar’s dapper fingerwork, of course. Terraced dynamics and half-tints of pedal evoke trumpets and winds in Gabrieli’s joyous Canzon quarta.

What bracing trills and hair-trigger scale passages Pienaar delivers throughout Muffat’s Partita IV, while serving up a more unified and colorfully contrasted reading of Buxtehude’s large-scale “La Capricciosa” Variations than most period performers manage to do. And while Pienaar allows for pockets of space or “air” between the notes in Keril’s Passacaglia, he manages to shape the sounds and silences into long-lined entities. I encourage listeners to discover their own favorite works and magic moments across this intelligently programmed, splendidly engineered, and boundlessly satisfying release.

– ClassicsToday.com (10/10; Jed Distler)

What makes it work is not just the dazzling precision and clarity of Pienaar’s finger technique (though that is certainly a vital factor), but the intelligence that has gone into his interpretations. He also communicates an individual and convincing vision for each piece, enough for every one of them to give delight.

–Gramophone (Editor's Choice; June 2020)

Andreas Staier’s informed and inspired interpretations have left their mark on the discography of both the harpsichord and the fortepiano and have enabled us to see Bach, Mozart and Schubert in a completely new light. This is Staier’s first solo album of a projected series for Alpha Classics, in which he also presents his own compositions for the first time. “Two motifs connect the works in this recording: the first is a ancient cantus firmus, a melody in long notes […] the second is the interval sequence of octave, fifth, sixth, and third. […] Anklange, my six pieces for harpsichord, grew out of several conversations I had with the composer Brice Pauset about what it means to compose in our time, and in particular what it implies to compose for historical instruments. This led me to ask myself how I could express and capture my own conception of music in notes, marked as it is not only by Byrd, Bach and Schubert, but also by the music of the 20th and 21st centuries."

REVIEW:

This release is a good example of Andreas Staier’s intelligent program building, both intellectually and musically speaking. Two motifs form a thread that runs through most of the works assembled here. One is the note sequence E–F-sharp–A–G-sharp–F-sharp–E that appears in Johann Caspar Ferdinand Fischer’s E major Prelude and Fugue from Ariadne Musica, Bach’s E major Prelude and Fugue from The Well-Tempered Clavier Book II, plus Froberger’s Fantasia II and Ricercar IV (the latter transposed to begin with G). The other motif is based on a sequence of intervals: octave, fifth, sixth, and third. Other pre-Bach composers include Louis Couperin and Johann Joseph Fux

At the recital’s midpoint, Staier features his own six pieces for harpsichord composed in 2020 that comprise a suite entitled Anklänge. His style forgoes tonality for the most part, yet his boundless palette of sonorities, his dramatic registral deployment, and his instincts for when and how to leave space all generate palpable tension and release. The fourth piece, for example, makes arresting use of thick spread chords that resonate for a long time under the fingers, while No. 6 features aphoristic lines that unfold like skywriting, with plenty of air between each utterance.

Indeed, resonance and breathing room characterize Staier’s performing style, which revels in the colorful variety of stops offered on his harpsichord modeled after a 1734 Hieronymus Albrecht Hass model. You’ll notice this in how Staier times and differentiates his arpeggiations of chords throughout the Couperin Pavane, as well as in the melting impact of his masterful finger legato in the Froberger Meditation. Surprisingly, Staier takes a forthright tempo for the aforementioned Bach Fugue, where his octave couplings have a rather upholstered effect that, for my taste, works against the music’s reflective and vocally oriented nature. Still, Staier remains the masterful instrumentalist and thinking musician that has long enamored me to his extensive and wide-ranging discography.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

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.