François Couperin was the most illustrious member of a dynasty of musicians comparable to that of the Bach family. There is every reason to believe that his name "Couperin the Great", first found in writing in 1780, had already been bestowed upon him during his lifetime to distinguish him from the other musicians in his family. In addition to his duties as the King's organist at Versailles, Couperin taught the harpsichord to many students from the royal family and the ranks of the nobility and, at the turn of the century, he was as active a composer as he was a performer. His work for harpsichord represents the most prominent part of his musical production with his pedagogical work L'Art de toucher le clavecin, or “The Art of Playing the Harpsichord” in English. The work was published in 1716 and deals with ornamentation, fingering, the general position of the body, – particularly focusing on the wrists - the touch, the character of the instrument, and so on. Also from this fruitful period we find his twenty-seven "orders" - a term he used to refer to a group of pieces with similar tonalities, halfway between a suite and an anthology. The work is divided into four volumes, published between 1713 and 1730. He develops a world of poetic fantasy that takes on the form of simple dance movements, portraits, "character pieces", pastoral paintings or theatrical miniatures. Here the Swedish harpsichordist Carole Cerasi offers us the complete works, spread over ten albums including L'Art de toucher le clavecin and the four Books, which she distributes over six different harpsichords.
The first volume opens with L'art, which Cerasi performs on an Antwerp Ruckers model from 1624; it continues with the First Book which also covers the second and third volumes. This book contains five orders; it was published in 1713, although several of the pieces it contains had been written years earlier. For the First Book , Carole Cerasi plays an Antwerp harpsichord by Andreas Ruckers, built in 1636 and reworked in 1763 in Paris by Henri Hemsch, giving a Franco-Flemish sound! © SM/Qobuz