French Harpsichord Music

The New Grove Dictionary has entries on 10 musically active members of the Couperin dynasty, of whom Armand-Louis is, chronologically speaking, the eighth. Born in 1725, he was the son of one of the great François Couperin’s cousins, and held a number of organ posts in Paris, including the virtually family-owned one of St Gervais, on the way to Vespers at which he was killed in a road accident just a few months before the Revolution. According to accounts he was a likeable man whose life was led free from strife and uncorrupted by ambition, and it is not fanciful to say that such are the qualities which inform his harpsichord music. Mostly rather rangy character pieces, though with a sprinkling of dances, they show the bold textural richness of the later French harpsichordist-composers, if without the galloping imagination of figures such as Rameau, Balbastre or Royer. Instead, they prefer to inhabit a contented rococo world, into which they bring considerable professional polish. If that makes the pieces sound predominantly ‘pleasant’, well, so they are… as agreeable a body of solo harpsichord music as any. But they are not vapid and neither are they easy, and we can be grateful that this selection has fallen to a player as technically assured and as musically sympathetic as Sophie Yates.

British harpsichordist Gilbert Rowland, who has recorded well-received versions of works by Soler and Scarlatti, here turns his attention to Handel's suites for harpsichord. These works have been historically neglected, apparently for the mere reason that they are not like Bach's partitas. Published mostly in 1720 and 1733 but dating in some cases from the earliest years of Handel's career, they are brilliant works that effectively fuse the decoration-encrusted French style with joyous Italianate lightness. They can be approached in several different ways. Rowland steers away from tempo variations, offering crisp readings that tend to drive directly forward through a phrase and then pause slightly at its end.

“Although it is certainly part of a performer’s task both to nurture a special relationship with a work and to give the public a chance to enjoy it, the first thing that you need to do is to separate the work from its history.”

Christopher Hogwood is an irreplaceable figure in a marvelous period that spans over thirty years, the time of the rebirth of the ancient and baroque repertoire: a time of so-called performances with original instruments, as they were hastily defined in an urge to simplify. A period in which, amid the initial skepticism of the critics and their subsequent appreciation, important artists and philologists restored to music lovers the joy of rediscovering masterpieces that had often been forgotten and performing practices that had long been abandoned, recreating enormous interest in a repertoire that is still continuing to reveal the existence of great forgotten musical treasures.

Louis Couperin was a French Baroque composer and harpsichord player. He was a member of a family of musicians and was one of the most important composers of harpsichord music in his time. He studied with the famous composer and founder of the French harpsichord school, Jacques Champion de Chambonnières. Louis was introduced to the court of Louis XIV and on April 9th 1653 became organist at Saint-Gervais, one of the most important positions in Paris at the time which he held until his death. He later became one of the organists at the Chapelle Royale.

“[These suites] have rarely been recorded or promoted by harpsichordists during the most recent revival of interest in ‘early music.’” I realize that Richard Egarr is entitled to his own opinions—his liner notes on an earlier release, for example, likened the humor in Purcell’s harpsichord music to that of the wonderful old 1950s BBC comedy The Goon Show —but he’s not entitled to his own facts. Christopher Brodersen pointed out in a 2011 review of these works featuring Laurence Cummings ( Fanfare 34:5) that ArkivMusic listed nine complete sets played on the harpsichord, with several others on the piano. I find some of the suites have considerably more recordings than that, in 2014: 26 for the Suite in A Major, 28 for the Suite in D Minor, 25 for the Suite in E Minor, 47 for the Suite in E Major. If such numbers reflect rare recordings, I have to wonder what Egarr would consider a moderate number, let alone a frequent one.