Luogo e data di registrazione		Haarlem (The Netherlands) - Maggio 1987
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Artist and reppertoire production		Rupert Fäustle
	Recording producer		Mike Bremner
	Engineer		Ko Witteveen
	Art direction		George Cramer
	Prima Edizione LP		Philips | LC 0305 | 420 939-1 | 1 LP - durata 61' 36" | (p) 1988 | DIGITAL
	Edizione CD		Philips | LC 0305 | 420 939-2 | 1 CD - durata 61' 36" | (p) 1988 | DDD
	Cover Art		Photo by Fernando van Teylingen
	Note		-

Though not as numerous as the Bach clan, the Couperin family was remarkable in producing a dozen professional musicians who occupied important positions in seventeenth and eighteenth-century France. More than half of them (including two women) were in the royal service, and over a period of 170 years seven were organists at St. Gervais, in Paris. The first Couperin to be appointed to the splendid organ there was Louis (c.1626-1661). He had attracted the attention of the family's landowning neighbour Chambonnières (then court harpsichordist), who took him to Paris in 1654 and was instrumental in placing him both at St. Gervais and in the Chapel Royal. None of his music serms to have been published during his lifetime, but his keyboard compositions were eagerly copied out by several of his contemporaries. Some 120 harpsichord pieces by him have survived in the most important source, dance movements of the same kind (allemandes, courantes, etc.) are grouped by key, but suites can be arranged from these according ta taste. although improvvisatory "unméansured" preludes (i.e. without any indication of rhythm) had previously been written for the lute. Louis was the first to adopt this style for the harpsichord: the present example is one of his few to contain also a rhythmic ricercare-like central section. The "wonderful dissonances" (in the words of a writer of the period) that enriched his music are most plaintly to be heard in the second Sarabande and the dark-toned Chaconne (which is a rondeau with four episodes). His nephew François (1668-1733), the greatest of the Couperins - he was universally admired, and known as "Le grand" even in his lifetime - was ennoble before the age of 30 by Louis XIV, to whose chldren he was music-master. His "L'art de toucher le clavecin" (1716), besides providing invaluable information about keyboard fingering, phrasing, and ornamentation of the time, contains eight very fine preludes, several of which (particularly the first) adopt the style brisé of lute technique: four (Nos. 1, 2, 4 and 5), although "meansured" for euse of reading, were specifically directed to be played with rhythmic freedon. His major contribution to harpsichord literature, however, was his 27 Ordres (suites) of binary dance movements, rondeaux or chaconnes, with picturesque or fanciful titles - including people, places, objects, or character studies such as "La doucer" or "L'évaporèe" (The giddy girl). "Le dodo" is based on a nursery melody. "La princesse de Chabreuil" is named for a daughter of François's patron the Prince of Monaco. The St. Gervais post was to cost armand-Louis (1723-1789) - François's second cousin - his life, for after serving there for 40 years he was knocked down by a horse and killedwhithin hurryng there from vespsers at the Chapel Royal, where he had been officiating. He published little keyboard music apart from his "Livre de clavecin" (1751). The three pieces here from it are all in the old rondeau form: the energetic refrain of "L'intrèpide" in strongly chordal, and its unusually long second episode includes several modulations; the refrain of the more sober Rondeau in B flat consists of a chain of suspensions which reappears note for none is the dominant key in the first episode, and the title of "L'Arlequine," together with its madcap gaiety and caprice, brand it almost certainly as a portrait of a contemporary eany. Lionel Salter