Forqueray, A: La Couperin

French harpsichordist Olivier Baumont has distinguished himself as a performer and scholar, specializing in French Baroque repertoire. He took up the harpsichord without learning piano first, sharing his family's love for French history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He studied with Kenneth Gilbert and Huguette Dreyfus and worked with Gustav Leonhardt in his master classes in Cologne. He was awarded first prize in harpsichord (1981) and in chamber music (1982) at the Paris Conservatory and won the Concours de Solistes de Radio France in 1982. He frequently performs at music festivals in Europe, England, and the United States, and has toured widely. Since 1992, he has directed the Festival Couperin at Chaumes-en-Brie. In September, 2001, Baumont became professor of harpsichord at the Paris Conservatory. He is the author of a biography of François Couperin, has edited harpsichord works by Michel Corrette and Jacques Duphly, and has contributed scholarly articles to numerous musicological journals.

This disc presents a the music of a group of French musicians who throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries painted each other’s portraits, or their self-portraits, generally with considerable wit.

We know that they were familiar with each other, and many of them are described in works bearing their names, or in tributes such as tombeaux. Thus Rameau, in his Pièces de clavecin en concerts, made fun of himself, and then offered his personal vision of Marin Marais and Forqueray.

Forqueray, for his part, depicts himself with a tone of authority that we recognise from his music. After this, in a lighter vein, he has fun imagining how to describe Leclair or Couperin. Marais, assuming an official air with son Tombeau pour Mr de Lulli, renders a magnificent homage to this dominant personality of his time; yet he also relates with intense inwardness how music was transmitted to him by his master Sainte-Colombe and what kind of man the latter was.

These pieces do not form suites of dances, so typically French, but rather a sort of guided tour through a teeming variety of timbres, thanks to instruments as different as the guitar, the harpsichord and the theorbo, which with the second bass viol make up a rich continuo group, light when necessary, lively and colourful.