Couperin: Suites

The Couperin here is Louis (1626-1661), uncle of the most highly regarded of the musical dynasty, François. Like his nephew, Louis was a much-admired composer of keyboard music, though because only a fraction of his works survive, in just three manuscripts (two of them only rediscovered in the 1960s), his music is still relatively little known. To complicate things further, the pieces we have got – preludes and allemandes, courantes and sarabandes – are not grouped into suites in the sources, leaving Christophe Rousset to make his own compilations to create the six suites, each in a different key, he plays on these discs. Rousset uses one of the oldest surviving French harpsichords for the recording, too – a recently restored instrument from 1658, with a beautifully reedy sound that suits these pieces perfectly. His playing has a kind of courtly correctness, more rhythmically precise and less free-spirited than some interpreters of the keyboard music of the French baroque, but with an airy grave of its own. They are beautifully realised discs.