Le Clavecin a Paris (The Harpsichord In Paris In The 17th Century) [Triple Album]

American Record Guide

This is an opportunity to hear and compare 3 original French harpsichords. The instruments are by Jean-Henry Hemsch (1761), Andreas Ruckers (1646) renovated by Pascal Taskin (1780), and Jean-Claude Goujon (1749) modified by Jacques Joachim Swanen (1784).

The collection is a grab bag of highlights from the 18th Century French repertoire, almost all familiar and easy to find elsewhere. It does not include complete suites, except the first one by Forqueray along with some isolated pieces by him. The other 6 composers are Marchand, Couperin, Rameau, Duphly, Balbastre, and ArmandLouis Couperin. I am most attracted to the several drone pieces by Balbastre on Disc 3.

For at least the past 40 years, Immerseel has appeared more as a conductor and fortepianist than as a harpsichordist. He has an attractively delicate touch on these harpsichords. He emphasizes a simpler and more lyrical side of this music than the conventional brilliance that the younger generations learned from Gustav Leonhardt. He isn’t cultivating charm, but he is playing famously excellent period instruments carefully and letting the compositions speak for themselves.

His ornaments are not automated twitches of his fingers, but he takes the time to make them better than that. They are languid vocal shapes—like savoring the syllables of spoken poetry. They are sometimes slightly clumsy. It seems more human that way, not prefabricated. Aficionados will already have other favorite recordings of Rameau’s music. The readings of those pieces here are ordinary. Immerseel is better at the next generation’s pieces on Disc 3. The tuning is good except where some of the meantone fifths have drifted to be irregularly too narrow. This is most apparent in a few Couperin pieces on the Hemsch harpsichord, Disc 1. Immerseel tunes the other harpsichords differently and appropriately.

At the end of the program, ArmandLouis Couperin’s Affligee is a wistful downer, the end of that world of extravagance. The performance takes us through this depiction of illness with stoicism, nobly holding the head up to get through some unspecified grief. As with the pieces on the other discs, Immerseel plays plainly (without overt characterization). There was a more intense Affligee from Benjamin Alard recently (July/Aug 2023). The piece is fabulous when played either way

Bradley Lehman