King Couperin

Ensemble Molière presents a luxuriant and varied selection of French Baroque music to accompany Louis XIV, the Sun King, in his daily life. What better way to wake up than to be serenaded by the Overture from Charpentier’s Les Arts Florissants ? The King’s day continues with extracts from Lully’s Phaëton as the sun rises, a little Couperin as the royal household’s day unfolds, a Symphonie pour les soupers du Roy by Delalande to accompany supper, dance music from the Ballet Royal de la Nuit and a suite to accompany the setting sun from Marais’ Trios pour le coucher du Roy . Louis XIV chose to portray himself as the Sun, the manifestation of the god Apollo on earth and the ultimate power which gives life to all things. This album reimagines a day in the life of one of the most magnificent royals of the Baroque era.

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 Siècle and the dawn of the Enlightenment.

For their third disc, Les Timbres return to French chamber music (after Pieces of Harpsichord in Concerts by Rameau-Flora, Diapason d'Or in 2014). In great company, the ensemble offers a version particularly rich in colors of this opus that Couperin publishes in 1722 following his Third Book of harpsichord pieces. He gives four suites of dances for several instruments, typically French, destined for small concerts for the aging king who loves to hear these dances that have given him so many pleasures in his youth. From the intimacy of one or two instrumentalists to the greatness of ten musicians, this is a festival of …. timbres (!) That invites you to this new recording of this splendid work by Francois Couperin.

The Italian-style trio sonata, honed by Corelli into a monument of seventeenth century classicism with its perfect balance of new-found tonality and assimilation of dance forms into art music, had a hard time finding a foothold in France. Among other aspects, the unwillingness to abandon the dance suite – possibly caused by the privileged position of ballet as a royal pastime at the court of Louis XIV – meant that French composers waited until the end of the century to compose "proper" trio sonatas. But a great deal of experimentation with the form went on before that, and not surprisingly one of the experimenters was the Italian "immigrant" Lully. His rôle at the court of the Sun-king included providing small-scale works for the Coucher du Roi, the nightly ceremony marking the king's withdrawal to bed.

François Couperin is best-known for his instrumental and keyboard works. He also composed quite a number of vocal works, but that part of his output remains in shadow with the exception of the three Leçons de Ténèbres which count among the most renowned vocal works for Passiontide. These also belong among the very few vocal compositions from Couperin's pen which were printed during his lifetime. Most of his vocal works are preserved in manuscript and it is assumed that a considerable part of his output in this genre has been lost.

François Couperin ‘Le Grand’ is the most important member of the Couperin dynasty, whose elegant and trend‐setting music is known to have influenced great composers such as J.S. Bach, Telemann and Handel. After becoming organist at St. Gervais in Paris at the age of just 12, he was later appointed Organiste du Chapelle du Roy. It was here that he composed the Concerts Royaux and the Goûts‐Réunis (or Nouveaux Concerts) for the entertainment of the aging King Louis XIV. Each includes the florid ornamentation typical of the French Baroque and is extremely adaptable, essentially written for a treble and bass instrument and continuo.

The eighteenth century is probably the most extraordinary period of transformation Europe has known since antiquity. Political upheavals kept pace with the innumerable inventions and discoveries of the age; every sector of the arts and of intellectual and material life was turned upside down. Between the end of the reign of Louis XIV and the revolution of 1789, music in its turn underwent a radical mutation that struck at the very heart of a well-established musical language. In this domain too, we are all children of the Age of Enlightenment: our conception of music and the way we ‘consume’ it still follows in many respects the agenda set by the eighteenth century. And it is not entirely by chance that harmonia mundi has chosen to offer you in 2011 a survey of this musical revolution which, without claiming to be exhaustive, will enable you to grasp the principal outlines of musical creation between the twilight of the Baroque and the dawn of Romanticism.