Dear Friends,
I’d like to invite you to Glissando’s next concert, “Music of Paris,” on Friday, March 22, at 7:30 PM, at First Church Boston (66 Marlborough Street). The program features keyboard works by the two most prominent members of the Couperin family, Louis and François, as well as the First Book of Preludes by Claude Debussy, all played by yours truly on the First Church’s Steinway.
I’d like to say a few words about the music. What the Bachs were in Germany, the Couperins were in France—a family of exceptionally talented composers and performers who were a major presence in the musical culture of their time and whose influence lasted for generations to come. The most famous of them were Louis (1626–61) and his nephew François, nicknamed “the Great” (1668–1733). Both were outstanding keyboard players and left a large number of exquisite works for harpsichord.
A composer of genius who died young, Louis Couperin wrote spirited, finely chiseled dance movements. His music is noble in expression and direct in impact. He created the genre of unmeasured prelude (prélude non mesuré), where the music is unbarred and the notation gives the performer absolute interpretive freedom. One of them will open the concert. In the dance movements that will follow, the harmonies are often of great boldness and the rhythms of tremendous vitality. Louis’s rocking rondo-chaconnes are a hallmark of his style, and the program will feature one. The closing piece of the set, “Tombeau de Mr Blancrocher,” is a memorial for his lutenist friend, Charles Fleury, Sieur de Blancrocher, a celebrated player who died in a tragic accident, falling down the stairs. It is perhaps Louis Couperin’s most beautiful and touching work.
François Couperin, Louis’s nephew, published his famous four books of harpsichord works from 1713 to 1730, and is credited with establishing the genre of a programmatic keyboard piece. François’ music is imaginative, poetic, refined, sensuous, and richly ornamented. Most of his keyboard works have descriptive titles and often are musical portraits of the composer’s contemporaries from all walks of life—fellow musicians, actors, courtiers, even members of royal families. Many of the people who were immortalized in Couperin’s compositions found that his musical depiction of them captured their respective personalities to perfection. Apart from these works’ purely musical value (J.S. Bach was a fan of Couperin’s music and even copied it out by hand), they remain an invaluable source of information for the historians of the era. Occasionally, Couperin even ventures into musical politics. The Eleventh Suite (Onzième Ordre), to be performed in our concert, starts with four musical portraits. Then, there comes the pièce de résistance, a five-act tragicomedy called “The Pageant of the Grand and Ancient League of Musicians,” a brilliant satire on an old guild that tried to monopolize all the performance activities in Paris, but was, by Couperin’s time, completely outdated. Akin to Jacques Callot’s etchings, the piece is a venture into the grotesque and a fabulous example of Couperin’s imagination and wit.
The second half of the concert will present Book I of Debussy’s Preludes. This famous work, inspired by nature, art, mythology, literature, dance, and many different cultures, needs no introduction. From my standpoint, it is fascinating to hear how Debussy refashioned the charm of “old” French keyboard music into the magic of his “modern” piano Preludes.
Please join us for this concert! I look forward to seeing you there.
Musically yours,
Sergey Schepkin Founder and Artistic Director, Glissando
Artwork: “Mezzetino” (detail) by Antoine Watteau (1684–1721), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Photo of Sergey Schepkin by Michael Lutch