ProStudioMasters.com

The art of Couperin leads us to discover the mystery which tales place between music and the musicians at the moment they play the piece. It is a fleeting, immediate relationship, more thrill than expression, more excitement than feeling. As Philippe Beaussant says, “It is no longer enough merely to convey the purity or clarity of a musical line, to trace the curve of a song, to develop its ornamentation; we must suggest the frisson of a moment in time, reveal the heartbeat, the imperceptible vibration which, born of music, no longer appears as a distortion, but, on the contrary, as its essential manifestation.” The project to perform the four “orders” comprising the sonades and the corresponding suites using period instruments was born in the early 1980s. In those days, Jordi Savall taught viola da gamba and chamber music at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Basel and collaborated with various ensembles that were pioneers in the rediscovery of the early music heritage, which lead to the nucleus of musician friends with whom I recorded, beginning in 1975, for the EMI Electrola and Astrée labels: Hopkinson Smith and Ton Koopman, soon joined by Monica Huggett and Chiara Banchini, two wonderful baroque violinists, and an exceptional team of wind instruments - Stephen Preston (transverse flute), Michel Henry and Ku Ebbinge (oboe), and Claude Wassmer (bassoon). It was thanks to this true “Réunion des Goûts” that they were able to put together the ideal team for this project. Then came the intense rehearsals, the concerts, and finally the recording in the Salle des États de Lorraine at the Château de Fléville-devant-Nancy, for Michel Bernstein’s Astrée label in May, 1983. That was the seed which, six years later, would give birth to the ensemble Le Concert des Nations during the preparation of the concerts and the recording of the programme devoted to Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Canticum Beate Virgine.