Bob van Asperen - Louis Couperin Edition, Vol. 1: Preludes de Mr. Couperin (2006)

The music of Louis Couperin has never had quite the celebrity of that of his uncle François or of the other famous French keyboard composers of the eighteenth century. The harpsichord works here date from around 1650. They were thus contemporary with reign Mazarin, the courtier and prime minister who really ruled France, at least until the rebellion known as the Fronde curbed the power of the court. The lush booklet does an excellent job of placing Couperin against his cultural background, and really the disc is worth purchasing for the lavish illustrations of the period French harpsichord used (the small picture of the Greek god Pan above the keyboard is reproduced at full size inside, and it's fabulous). Dutch harpsichordist Bob van Asperen, a student of Gustav Leonhardt, is ideally suited to make the best possible case for Couperin's music, which can be deadly dull if the harpsichordist plods along through the suites of dances in which his music was assembled and published (the suites were not compositionally conceived as wholes, and van Asperen is justified in adding in questionable works by virtue of key similarity). The elder Couperin's music has none of the programmatic dazzle of François Couperin's fancifully titled harpsichord pieces, but it's quite ingenious in the way it fuses French dances with the quasi-improvisatory Italian keyboard tradition of Frescobaldi and his German successor Froberger. The fusion is apparent not only in Couperin's preludes, to which van Asperen lends an appropriately fiery aspect, but also in the dances themselves – the dance rhythms are apparent but are gnawed at by a restless free spirit that occasionally manifests itself in a notated "a discrétion" direction – hear the very un-giguelike Gigue in the opening Suite in D minor (track 7). The individual movements are mostly quite short but entirely distinctive. The album ends with a work called the Duretez Fantaisie that draws on yet an earlier layer of Italian music – the freakish harmonic experimentation of the late sixteenth century, as evident in music by composers like Giovanni de Macque. It's not a particularly spectacular example, but it helps fill out what is an unusually detailed portrait of Louis Couperin's harpsichord music – an ideal purchase for libraries or for any basic Baroque collection.