The Couperin family are probably the best-known family of musicians after the Bach family. Active mostly during the 17th and 18th centuries the two most prominent members are Louis Couperin and his nephew François Couperin le grand. The Couperin family were mainly keyboard players producing a wealth of music for organ and harpsichord. François wrote chamber music as well, including some lovely trio sonatas and excellent music for voice, the Leçons de Ténèbres for two sopranos and continuo, as well as several pieces for chamber orchestra and three organ masses, but it is for his harpsichord music that he is most recognized. Eight out of the sixteen CDs in this collection are devoted to his twenty-seven suites or ordres for the instrument. In comparison, Jean-Philippe Rameau's music for harpsichord can be fitted onto just two CDs. Mind you, Rameau put most of his energy into composing operas. Rameau's pieces for harpsichord are more spectacular and virtuosic and are perhaps more well-known as a result, but for subtlety, elegance and graceful simplicity Couperin has no superior.
Keep in mind that the suite or ordre in Couperin's version is not the brief set of dances that Johann Jakob Froberger put together consisting of an allemande, courante, sarabande, and gigue. Couperin's ordres often have eighteen or twenty movements with those dances interspersed with others and including movements with characteristic names instead of dance genre titles. These include names like La Voluptueuse and La Diligente as well as Les Idées heureuses. The dance movements include not only the ones that Froberger used but lesser-known dances such as gavotte, canaries, passepied, rigaudon. In addition the same ordre might have two courantes, two sarabandes, two gigues and the occasional rondeau. The dances are usually in binary form and often have accompanying doubles (ornamented versions with the same bass line). Not all the movements of an ordre need be in the same key. The Premier Ordre for example has seven movements in D minor followed by one in G major, returning to D minor for two movements, then two in G major, one in D minor, one in G major and so on, ending in a movement in D minor. Audiences today struggle to know when to clap when they are confronted with pieces in three or four movements--one wonders what would happen if they met up with a Couperin ordre. Of course Grigory Sokolov plays these in concert, but he has his audiences trained to only clap if and when he stands up.
The movements of a Couperin ordre are typically quite short, ranging between one and five minutes in length with most of them around two minutes or so. The texture is highly ornamented in most pieces. For an example, here are the first three measures of the first piece, an allemande, in the Premier Ordre:
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And after all that, I seem to have forgotten to do the actual review. I don't really have anything to say! The performances seem quite fine. You can go to YouTube and compare the two clips above with ones by several other performers. The standards for harpsichord performance are quite high these days so I don't think you go wrong with any well-known performer. The ordres on the the disc excerpted above are played on two seventeenth century instruments. I imagine they put some new strings on...
UPDATE: I should mention that the Laurence Boulay recordings of the integral harpsichord music that take up half of the discs in the box were originally made in the mid-1970s and remastered in 2018. The sound quality is just fine though a couple of pieces have a questionable temperament.
UPDATE: I should mention that the Laurence Boulay recordings of the integral harpsichord music that take up half of the discs in the box were originally made in the mid-1970s and remastered in 2018. The sound quality is just fine though a couple of pieces have a questionable temperament.
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