Luogo e data di registrazione		Amsterdam (Holland) - 1971
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Recording Supervision		Dr. Thomas Gallia | Dr. Alfred Krings
	Engineer		Sonart
	Prima Edizione LP		Harmonia Mundi (Basf) | 20 20348-2 | 1 LP - durata 44' 40" | (p) 1971
	Edizione CD		Deutsche Harmonia Mundi | LC 00761 | 82876 70000 2 | 1 CD - durata 44' 40" | (c) 2005 | ADD
	Cover Art		-
	Note		-

"... j'avoueray de bonne foy que j'ayme beaucoup mieux ce qui me touche que ce qui me surprend." from the forward to the Pièces de clavecin I A French composer who writes no ballets is like an Italian composer who has no interest for the opera. None of the works of François Couperin was intended for the stage; nothing was written for orchestra-and yet his contemporaries admired him as organist, harpsichordist, composer and teacher. Descendents term his contribution the "sum of French music". The respected office of organist at St. Gervais was reserved as early as 1679 for the eleven-year-old upon the death of his father Charles. His uncle Louis Couperin had already been active at this church; the nephew assumed (entered upon the office at seventeen). Five years later he published his two masses for organ, which established the fame of the composer. Upon taking the position as organist at the Chapelle du roy in Versailles in 1693, he attained the external peak of his career. Spending his entire life in Paris, he was to become not only teacher to the royal family, but also mentor to a generation of French musicians. The fruits of Couperin's pedagogic engagement were made manifest in 1716 with the publication of the Art de toucher le clavecin, which he dedicated to the young Louis XV. Bach used this theoretical work, the knowledge of which is the foundation of the study and performance of French music for harpsichord, without which, however, the interpretation of German music in the French style must remain inadequate. The life of the organist and harpsichordist at Versailles passed without crucial turning points. Similar to Bach, Couperin concentrated during the last twenty years of his life on the collection and accurate editing of his works. His work is easily surveyable. Several motets along with some “versets", a few elevations, and above all the late, very expressive Lamentations of Jeremias comprise the entire extant body of sacred music. The chamber music consists mainly trios, the older of which being in the Italian style of sonatas for 2 violins and basso continuo.The younger vary in orchestration and attempt in their language to combine Italian and French styles. The title of a collection from 1724 is typical: Les Goûts réunis. Also in the field of chamber music a late work comes to represent a culmination; the Pièces de viole (1728), written for the less and less used viola da gamba. Even during Couperin’s lifetime, the Pièces de clavecin enjoyed a wide popularity. The “ordres" of the published pieces in four books correspond only remotely to the stricter forms of the suites as they were composed in Germany. They are for the most part collected works which were preferred in earlier periods and from which the performer might chose. Although Couperin used in the fifth ordre the traditional plan with the series Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue, the movements are nevertheless often individual portraits rather than parts of a larger context. In the seventh ordre the poetic pictures are ordered entirely one after the other, possessing little suggestive painting and having usually short and clear musical forms, dance-like, with a floating lightness even where the dark registers of the harpsichord are preferred. In each of these movements Couperin has, as he wrote, an "objet" which he continually repeated or transformed. Thus the metamorphoses of a musical idea can be found in the numerous Rondeaux, as well as in the forms of the Chaconne.They reflect ideally the wish for a "unité de sentiment" of the French art. The elegance of all these Pièces recall the model of the seventeenth-century French lutenists who influenced so permanently the harpsichord style. The tendency to arpeggi and free passages becomes especially evident in those seemingly improvised Préludes of the Art de toucher, which Couperin intended as introduction for his "ordres”. Even his contemporaries recognized that Couperin was the counterpart to a cold virtuoso, as he appears sometimes in interpretations. The author of a work which mirrors the brilliant superfluousness of French art and nonetheless is capable of producing deeply expressive sounds speaks about this himself: "... I confess in all seriousness that I love rnuch more that which moves me than that which surprises me".