Home listening - a whole lot of Couperin going on

The Guardian 0

The 350th anniversary of the French composer’s birth is the perfect time to reconsider his output

• Why has the French baroque composer François Couperin (1668-1733) never quite made it to the top of the list of great masters? There’s so much to admire in the quirkiness and imagination of his music, with its bizarre descriptive titles, and he produced some of the most sensual religious music ever written. Maybe it’s because, unlike Rameau or Handel, he never wrote an opera; maybe also because his keyboard music never became really popular (as Bach’s did) on the piano.

But on the 16-CD François Couperin Edition that Warner Classics/Erato have produced to mark his 350th anniversary, the last disc contains a keyboard selection played by 20th-century pianists Georges Cziffra, Gina Bachauer and, best of all, Marcelle Meyer, whose subtly flowing account of Les baricades mistérieuses provides one and a half minutes of pure pleasure, upstaging Cziffra’s much slower version.