In the Age of Enlightenment, Composers of the Shadows by Catherine Zimmer ECL1750E

This program is available only in digital version in our catalog, and as such we cannot propose it on our website.

Product details :

Composer: Christophe Moyreau, Pierre Claude Foucquet, Jean-François Tapray

Artists :  Catherine Zimmer, harpsichord

Program : Christophe Moyreau : Oeuvre 1er; Pierre Claude Foucquet : excerpts from the second and the third books of harpsichord pieces, Jean-François Tapray : Les Sauvages with four variations

By the 1750s in France, François Couperin had already been dead for 20 years. In 1747, Jean-Philippe Rameau published, at age 70, his last piece for the harpsichord, La Dauphine, and from then on wrote only operas and treatises.

During this same decade, however, several volumes of harpsichord works were published by lesser known musicians, some of whom are today back in favour, among them Corrette, Duphly, Balbastre and Royer. But others — Foucquet, Moyreau and Tapray, for instance — remain in the shadows, despite their quality, their relevance for us today, and the attention they really deserve. For one thing, these men lived at the height of the Querelle des Bouffons (Quarrel of the Comic Actors), a period when pamphlets and counter-pamphlets were fomenting the war over the relative merits of Italian and French opera. And secondly, with their highly personal — at times even orchestral — style, these composers are able with their music to move us very deeply. First issued in 2006, this CD was an attempt to reverse their earlier fate, by drawing out from the shadows three unjustly forgotten musicians.

“The artist’s conviction, and her affinity for this sensitive and spectacular style, are quite remarkable. In this bouquet of rarities, delicate description goes side by side with brilliant programme pieces, the harpsichordist’s hands crossing and the instrument throbbing. Catherine Zimmer excels in detail (as in Foucquet’s Soeur Agnès, faithful to Couperin’s aesthetic); she moulds with an iron hand Moyreau’s Ouverture, and conjures up Les Cyclopes before our eyes with humour and a sure sense of theatre. Fully attentive to the charm of the registrations, she revives a certain French harpsichord tradition, but adds to that her sense of agogics and her appropriately orchestral vision.” Philippe Ramin, Diapason, March 2006