Customer Reviews

François Couperin: Les Concerts Royaux

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Imagine your charge: you are court composer to the most powerful man who has ever lived. The old king is dying, slowly, his faculties are gradually receding. He has his lucid moments, remembering this or that great triumph. He has his dreamy moments, his visions of beauty and pleasure. His majesty wishes to be entertained, surrounded by those he most highly esteems. The year is 1714, the place the Palais de Versailles: the King is Louis XIV.

You are Francois Couperin. Your music must not jar the king from his reveries, it must carry him, like a leaf, down a graceful French stream on a bright spring day. The birds must twitter, the breezes blow, and the sun! The sun must bounce off the waves as dazzling and blinding jewels of light. Your music must capture the king's melancholy, for he knows his life is ending, and he wants only the bittersweet relish of his life's sweet moments.

You have dazzled him for fifteen years with your own harpsichord music. You know others have greatly pleased him with their music as well: the great Lully, the sublime Marais, that cantakerous Ste Colombe.

So you create a series of entertainments. They must be short, for it is better to have the king ask for another than to have him fall asleep in the middle of a set. And they must be perfect, for you are in the service of the king.

These are four of those entertainments. They serve up all the styles of the old king's long life, they admit only of beauty and majesty.

This is not the music of our times, and it is not likely to be appreciated or enjoyed within the context of our times. If you permit, Sr Savall and his small band of players will take you back three hundred years, and give you those moments the old king had.

They are moments worth having.

Les Concerts Royaux is magnificent. It is easy to imagine the old king Louis XIV sitting in his salon on a Sunday afternoon listening to these concerts and dreaming of youth and bucolic nature. These are varied and interesting works, filled with colorful and evocative melodies. I love french music and this disc does not dissapoint. another work by Couperin you may wish to try are 'Les Lecons de Tenebrae'. The royal concerts are a must have for fans of french music. All the fine hallmarks of the noble baroque style of the music of the Sun King and his court are present here.

Listening to this excellent CD is just pure enjoyment.
This is french baroque at its best ( one would not expect less from Savall and his fantastic ensemble !).
You also get a great variety of top performances : oboe, flute,violin and viola da gamba as soloists.
If you like baroque music, just get this one .

françois couperin is my favourite composer, and this masterful album truly does justice to his beautiful music.

This is an absolutely lovely CD for anyone who appreciates Baroque period music. The music is beautifully performed.

While Savall has gathered some of the top players today to join him, the result is largely individualistic. Attention to fine details is lacking, as often ornaments are not played together in the same fashion, nor are phrases entirely similar. The orchestrations are clever and Savall and his collegues give us quite a number of rather touching movements. The overall result is good, and certainly better than some of the terribly square recordings existing on the market already (Robert Claire's bland offering comes to mind). I do find it a shame that given the potential for something quite spectacular with Savall, the end result is just 'good'.

once again Maestro Savall proves himself and his cosmopolitan band of collaborators to be without peer. Perfect for studying, dinner parties, or even fooling around ;) this disc is a must have.

Jordi Savall deserves our sincere thanks for restoring to the world the hithertoo forgotten gems of early music. From the music Charles V would've listened to to this luscious and sublime offering of Couperin's concerts for the Sun King, I am grateful this Catalan genius is continueing to share the fruits of his warmhearted detective work with the world at large.

Pick it up today, don't delay and check out ALL of Alia Vox's efforts too. In a world marred by violence allow Jordi Savall and his team to take you back to a time that seems more civilized, more tolerant and can still help us remember that music knows neither creed nor boundary and can make us all rejoice.