Les Baricades

L'influence de Francois Couperin sur ses contemporains et ses successeurs de l'école francaise de clavecin voire même à travers l'europe, tel est le programme éminement didactique de Davitt Moroney dans son pur style des années 1990, celui des émissions qu'il animait sur France Musiques.

Supreme among French composers of the Baroque era, François Couperin made his career at the court of Louis XIV. His creativity is manifest in his sacred music, chamber music and, above all, his abundant corpus of keyboard works, here presented complete in recordings by the harpsichordist Laurence Boulay in their first CD release. Interpretations on the piano come from such figures as Marcelle Meyer and Georges Cziffra, while other contributors to this collection, representing diverse schools of performance, include William Christie, Christophe Rousset and John Eliot Gardiner.

FonoForum 05 / 09: »Auf einem außerordentlich klangschönen Cembalo von Jean-Henry Hemsch (1751) trägt Frédérick Haas die Suiten 1 und 5 aus dem ersten sowie die Suiten 6, 7 und 8 aus dem zweiten Buch von François Couperin vor. Sehr gut gelingen ihm dabei die eleganten, geschmeidig inegalen Seiten dieser anspruchsvollen Musik, etwa in den berühmten ›Baricades mistérieux‹ oder den gleich darauf folgenden ›Bergeries‹.«

Trevor Pinnock is one of the world's leading exponents of historical performance practice, and this collection of Baroque keyboard favorites is one of his most successful attempts to communicate his musical values to a broad audience. These popular works are often anthologized, but seldom have they sounded as fresh and exciting as they do here. Handel's Harmonious Blacksmith and Bach's Italian Concerto are the best known of these selections, though Pinnock's playing liberates them from their use as flashy encore pieces and instead treats them as more intimate entertainments. François Couperin's magical Les baricades mistérieuses and Rameau's Gavotte Variations are also well known, and their inclusion on any disc of the harpsichord's "greatest hits" is de rigueur. Domenico Scarlatti's two Sonatas in E major are still brilliant, even at the lower tuning (A=415). The remaining works of this collection are perhaps less-widely heard, but each offers insights into both Pinnock's interpretive skills and the instrument's wealth of possibilities.