Les jumèles from Ordre 12, Book 2 (published 1716)

Passacaille from Ordre 8, Book 2 (published 1716)

Les ombres errantes from Ordre 25, Book 4 (published 1730)

Bruit de guerre extract from La triomphante from Ordre 10, Book 2 (published 1716)

Le carillon de Cithère from Ordre 14, Book 3 (published 1722)

Le tic-toc-choc ou Les maillotins from Ordre 18, Book 3 (published 1722)

The harpsichord music of some composers lends itself more readily to performance on the piano than that of others. J.S. Bach, for example, and his French colleague François Couperin are quite different in that respect. Unlike Bach, Couperin was a colourist, a baroque Debussy, who delighted in drawing from his instrument suggestions of both natural and man-made sounds, of atmosphere, character, even caricature. While it would be seriously overstating the case to claim that playing Couperin on the piano is as hopeless an exercise as playing Debussy on the harpsichord, the fact is that some of Couperin’s pieces cannot be translated into piano terms.

Of course, Couperin has long been played on the piano. It is difficult to imagine that Brahms, who collaborated with Chrysander on the first complete edition of the Pièces de Clavecin, actually worked on them at the harpsichord. Saint-Saëns not only applied his scholarly skills to another complete edition, published by in Paris by Durand, but also played Couperin in public. In spite of this tradition, however, after the revival of the harpsichord as the preferred instrument in the French baroque repertoire it requires much thought, not least in the selection of appropriate material, to include Couperin in a piano recital. Given, however, the four Livres de pièces de clevecin, including 226 pieces distributed through 27 Ordres (Couperin preferred the term “ordre” to the then current “suite”), there is no lack of choice.

While it cannot be denied that Couperin’s detailed melodic ornamentation and the arpeggiated textures of his characteristic style luthé are both more natural to the harpsichord, there is little in the six pieces included in this programme that is actually alien to the piano. The point of Les juméles (18th century French for jumelles or twin sisters) is not only its unfailingly tender expression but also the duality of character represented by the E major outer sections and the melodically related but temperamentally distinct E minor middle section. The Passacaille is of such structural and emotional interest that the choice of instrument is unimportant. A chaconne en rondeau, it consists of nine statements of its upward striving opening theme in B minor separated by eight contrasting couplets or episodes which – although they are all in the same key as the chaconne theme and in the same tempo    (with the possible exception of the fifth, marked mouvement marqué) – are based on falling melodic lines, each with its own rhythmic and expressive identity.

Les ombres errantes and Bruit de guerre represent opposite extremes in Couperin’s art. On the one hand, there is the poetic C minor pathos of the wandering shades repeatedly deflected from their harmonic course by chromatic inflections and sighing suspensions. On the other hand, there is the unappealing noise of war in a frankly primitive D major, the percussive opening theme recurring in alternation with three similarly aggressive episodes, the last of which is marked Combat. At another extreme, Le carillon de Cithére enchantingly evokes the bells of Cythera, the mythical isle of love celebrated in the paintings of the composer’s close contemporary and Parisian neighbour, Antoine Watteau – and, of course, his impressionist successor Claude Debussy.

As for Le Tic-Toc Choc, ou les Maillotons, it is impossible to play it on the piano as Couperin wrote it. A pièce croisée brilliantly scored for a two-manual harpsichord with the two hands deployed in the same octave at the same time, it can be accomplished in these circumstances only by transposing the left hand down or the right hand up an octave. Another problem is that, like so many of the programmatic pieces, it is adorned by a less than totally comprehensible title. The regular rhythms, quavers in the left hand and semi-quavers in the right, seem to explain the “tic-toc” part of it. But who were “les Maillotons”? The name suggests that they wielded mallets (maillets), which is not incompatible with the acoustic impression of a busy workshop.