• Why has the French baroque composer François Couperin (1668-1733) never quite made it to the top of the list of great masters? There’s so much to admire in the quirkiness and imagination of his music, with its bizarre descriptive titles, and he produced some of the most sensual religious music ever written. Maybe it’s because, unlike Rameau or Handel, he never wrote an opera; maybe also because his keyboard music never became really popular (as Bach’s did) on the piano.
But on the 16-CD François Couperin Edition that Warner Classics/Erato have produced to mark his 350th anniversary, the last disc contains a keyboard selection played by 20th-century pianists Georges Cziffra, Gina Bachauer and, best of all, Marcelle Meyer, whose subtly flowing account of Les baricades mistérieuses provides one and a half minutes of pure pleasure, upstaging Cziffra’s much slower version.
Warner’s set brings together Tenebrae lessons from William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, with the two well contrasted sopranos, Sophie Daneman and Patricia Petibon, and a classic account of the suite Les Nations by Frans Brüggen and Quadro Amsterdam. The harpsichord suites here sound old-fashioned in comparison with the superb set launched this year by Harmonia Mundi, Couperin L’Alchimiste, on which Bertrand Cuiller brings together suites from across Couperin’s output, including the final eloquent 27th Ordre in a tinglingly mean-tuned B minor.
• Concept albums are too predictable nowadays, but a couple deserve to be excepted: Elicia Silverstein’s The Dreams and Fables I Fashion (Rubicon), which draws a thoughtful, compelling line from Biber into Sciarrino’s Capriccio No 2, and from Sequenza VIII into Bach’s Chaconne; and Michelangelo’s Madrigal (Etcetera), in which Kate Macoboy’s soprano, with lutenist Robert Meunier, restores the primacy of textual expression to 16th-century song.
• Music Matters (Radio 3 and now on BBC Sounds) is in a flourishing phase. From Couperin to music for the Armistice, from women in jazz to schools minister Nick Gibb on music education, it is covering the issues that matter. Worth an appointment to listen.
