When I left Palo Alto to “officially” begin my retirement in San Francisco, I had to give up my Baldwin grand piano, which was totally unsuitable for a unit in Opera Plaza. Instead, I kept the Yamaha Clavinova, which I had purchased in Singapore prior to my move to Silicon Valley in 1995. Believe it or not, that instrument is still with me, as reliable as it had been when it was my only keyboard instrument in Singapore.
One of the things I Iiked about about the instrument was that, in addition to two “stops” for two different kinds of piano (concert grand and, presumably, spinet), it also had a harpsichord option. While this would not account for the full richness of sonorities of most models of that instrument, it gave me the opportunity to discipline myself away from leaning on a damper pedal. As a result, I decided to begin working my way through my two Dover volumes of the Complete Keyboard Works of François Couperin.
Olivier Baumont on the original cover of his Couperin box set
By that time I had acquired the 2018 Warner Music Group release of recordings of those complete works by harpsichordist Olivier Baumont. Ironically, this overlapped with an encounter with the American harpsichordist Mark Kroll, who had begun his own recording project of the same content with the first of the resulting eight CDs being released in November of 2016. As a result I now have two complete accounts of all of Couperin’s 27 ordres, along with the pedagogical L’Art de toucher le clavecin in the Baumont collection.
I have found that, for the most part, my piece-by-piece progress advances with one composition at a time. Every now and then, I encounter a trickier piece than usual; but I do not think I have ever needed to dwell on any selection for more than two weeks. Mind you, my results never rise to the standards of what one would expect to hear in a professional performance; but just getting to know the pieces with my fingers, rather than my CD player, has made for one of the ways that I now live from one day to the next!
I assume that this is the sort of thing that Couperin had in mind when he prepared these compositions for publication!
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