Couperin: Les Goûts-réünis – Rousset

François Couperin never had much interest in being called “le Grand” — that was posterity’s flattery, tacked on to distinguish him from a whole dynasty of musical Couperins clogging up the organ lofts of Paris. But posterity, having crowned him, mostly remembers him for the harpsichord music: the 27 ordres, with their birds and butterflies and mysterious character pieces named for court beauties nobody can quite identify anymore. The chamber concerts are a different animal. Written for no fixed instrumentation at all — Couperin simply didn’t say, leaving it to taste, to occasion, to whatever players happened to be standing around Versailles that afternoon — they occupy an odd, undefined space between the intimacy of the keyboard suites and the public grandeur of Lully’s old orchestral machine.

Christophe Rousset knows this repertory from the inside out. Eleven discs of solo harpsichord music for Harmonia Mundi were not undertaken lightly. Which makes the disappointment here sharper, not softer.

Something goes missing between the fingers and the ensemble. On the harpsichord, Rousset’s Couperin dances — sly, ornamented, the ornaments tossed off like asides in witty conversation. Hand him a violin, a bass viol, an oboe, and the wit seems to evaporate. Les Talens lyriques play with polish — the engineers at Radio France captured a warm acoustic in Studio 103 — but polish is not the same thing as pulse. Too often here the ensemble sounds like it is reading through a manuscript rather than inhabiting it.

Take the eleventh concert. The violinist’s tone in the second movement is thin, almost apologetic, as though the instrument itself were unconvinced of the music’s worth. The oboist arrives in the third movement sounding like he’s still finding his reed. Not wrong, exactly. Just tentative — the sort of playing you’d expect at a first rehearsal rather than on a finished release bearing a major label’s name. There’s a difference between restraint as interpretive choice and restraint as simple caution, and too much of this set falls on the wrong side of that line.

Couperin’s own markings should have been Rousset’s ally here. “Légèrement” means light, quick, unburdened — and in the fourth movement of the tenth concert, the movement called “La Tromba,” the ensemble finally catches fire, trumpet-calls in the violin lines snapping with real energy. It’s a glimpse of what the whole project might have been. But then the prelude to the eleventh concert arrives marked “majesteusement, sans trop de lenteur” — majestic, but not too slow — and Rousset gives us majesty at the expense of momentum, tempos dragging until the music loses its spine entirely. This happens again and again across the set: slowness mistaken for gravity, gravity mistaken for depth.

It’s a peculiar interpretive philosophy, when you think about it, as if Rousset decided the only emotional register available to this music was solemnity, and then built every tempo choice backward from that premise. Couperin was a composer of extraordinary emotional range even within a single ordre: tenderness, satire, melancholy, a kind of ironic tears-through-laughter quality that Rameau himself admired. None of that range survives translation into these particular chamber scorings, at least not in these hands.

Compare this to what period-instrument groups have done with Couperin’s dance suites elsewhere — the sprightliness Marc Minkowski or the Boston-based Handel and Haydn crowd bring to French baroque rhythm, that sense of the dance floor never quite out of earshot. This set feels earthbound by comparison. The balance between instruments is genuinely fine. No player swamps another; everything sits in its proper acoustic frame. But fine balance without vitality is a formal virtue, not a musical one.

There’s real music buried in these ten concerts — numbers five through fourteen, the ones that follow after the four written expressly for harpsichord — and a listener patient enough will find things worth returning to. But patience shouldn’t be a prerequisite for pleasure. Couperin deserved better advocacy than this. Rousset, on the evidence of his solo recordings, knows exactly what that advocacy should sound like. He simply didn’t bring it here.