I received this CD
quite by surprise. By surprise because
it came with others I was expecting
but as something of an unrequested ‘bonus’.
I was at first alarmed. French baroque
music is not an area where I would pretend
to be most knowledgeable. Give me Caldara,
Vivaldi, Stradella or Geminiani from
Italy and I am quite comfortable. But
give me Lully, Couperin and Rameau and
I am on slightly less familiar ground.
I looked at the title. Pièces
de Violes the label proudly boasted.
I don’t know very much about viol music.
Any apprehensions I
might have felt quickly dissipated on
listening to this beautiful disc. I
hadn’t come across these Finnish musicians
before but was immediately struck by
the musicianship and spontaneity of
the performances. The performers also
have an excellent sense of the French
baroque style and this was an experience
I very much enjoyed from beginning to
end and I can heartily recommend this
issue in every way.
It was only in the
latter part of his life that Couperin
published instrumental chamber music
to any extent. Before this his output
had been largely for the keyboard –
the music for which he is most celebrated
today. Written as late as 1728, the
two suites comprising the Pièces
de violes represent the end of the
by now tentative hold that the viols
had as viable instruments following
the onslaught of the relatively new-fangled
violin family.
The first Pièce
de viole is a large-scale baroque
suite comprising a Prélude
and six stylised dance movements popular
at the time. Throughout, the viols play
unequal roles – the first instrument
having the entire melodic interest while
the second is firmly in the role of
a continuo instrument. The second
suite immediately presents a different
aspect to Couperin’s writing. Much more
concise in construction – only four
movements here – the two viols are immediately
presented contrapuntally, one imitating
the other in a much more equitable way.
The centrepiece of this second suite
is the eight-minute Pompe funèbre
third movement.
The Nouveaux concerts
or Goûts-réunis
was the second part of a series of fourteen
pieces, designed for performance in
front of the French king, for unspecified
instruments with continuo. Several of
these have appeared on CD before in
numerous recordings on a variety of
instruments. The only concert
in which Couperin does mention unambiguous
instruments is the twelfth, where he
expressly specifies two viols. Goûts-réunis
translates roughly as ‘unified tastes’
and was Couperin’s attempt at combining
and reconciling aspects of the French
and Italian writing styles of the time.
Each of the concerts presented
here comprises a suite of four movements;
a very short Prélude serving
as little more than an introduction
to the air or dance movement that follows
it. The second viol largely acts as
a continuo instrument in the
10ème concert but
is very much the duo partner in the
12ème and 13ème
concerts, where Couperin calls for
just two instruments à l’unisson
(ie alone without keyboard).
The French baroque
pitch used here is very low at A=392
Hz, so everything sounds approximately
a tone lower than it appears on paper
and uses French tempérament
ordinaire, which lies somewhere
between mean-tone temperament
- which does not facilitate straying
into sharp and flat keys without keyboard
instruments experiencing some startling
tuning difficulties – and our modern
equal temperament.
For period-instrument
enthusiasts, both viols used in this
recording are seven-stringed copies
of late seventeenth/early eighteenth-century
French originals with Dutch Carrington
bows. The harpsichord is a recent reproduction
of a mid-eighteenth-century French instrument
by Pascal Taskin.
The AVIE recording
here is first class, with the balance
between instruments natural and perfectly
judged. Some might find the acoustic
of the fifteenth-century church in Karjaa
in south-west Finland, between Turku
and Helsinki, a shade too reverberant
but for me it suited the nature of the
music faultlessly. What did distract
me, however, was some of the heavy breathing
of the performers caught on microphone.
I would have preferred a little more
detail about the music and its origins
and function from the booklet note writer
Eero Hämeeniemi but the information
is adequate.
Derek Warby
for details
Markku Luolajan-Mikkola, Mikko Perkola
(bass viols); Aapo Häkkinen (harpsichord)
