Couperin, F: Pièces de clavecin I: Ordre 1ème in G major: Les silvains - CD

Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, a gifted harpsichordist, was also a great composer whose sonatas were much admired. Her successful blend of Italian fire with French elegance, allows the violin to shine in brilliant passages while giving fine solos to the viol, placing these pieces among the finest French instrumental music of the early 18th century.

Air on a G String brings together works by Jacques de Saint-Luc and Silvius Leopold Weiss, two of the master lutenists of the late 17th and early 18th centuries, as well as Russell’s own transcriptions for guitar of compositions by Johann Sebastian Bach and François Couperin.

Silvius Leopold Weiss, born in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland) in 1686, was the most renowned member of Germany’s leading family of lutenists during the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. Weiss wrote well over eight hundred pieces for lute – more than any other composer – including some sixty solo “sonatas”. The Flemish lutenist and composer Jacques de Saint-Luc was born in 1616 in Ath, twenty miles southwest of Brussels and not far from Belgium’s present-day border with France. Couperin’s Les Silvains (The Woodland Fauns, Book I of Pièces de Clavecin [1713], Ordre 1, No. 8) is one of his earliest keyboard works of the pastoralism that figured so prominently in 18th-century French art. Tours de Passe-Passe (Book IV [1730], Ordre 22, No. 8) is a French colloquialism for “legerdemain” or “sleight-of-hand,” and in Couperin’s playfully effervescent piece indicates the crossing of hands at the keyboard."