Couperin: Complete Harpsichord Music / Massimo Berghella [5 CDs]

Louis Couperin (1626-1661) has long been a fabled name among French keyboard composers. Born in the provinces in the late 1620s, he was 'discovered' by the visiting court harpsichordist Jacques Champion Chambonnières in about 1650; soon he had an appointment at court and was titulaire of the organ at St Gervais in Paris, founding the Couperin dynasty that included most prominently his nephew, François Couperin 'le grand'. Performers and listeners alike have long gravitated to Louis Couperin's music more than to that of any other member of the French keyboard school of the time, probably because of its fascinating and surprising harmonic language. There are 129 pieces catalogued as authentic. Among these, the unmeasured Preludes stand outas a kind of controlled improvisation in which Couperin gives us 16 examples of a genre that began life in the hands of the lutenists and now finds itself at the very peak of 17th century French harpsichord music. The Preludes present a sequence of semi