Portraits

This live recording immortalizes Christophe Rousset’s performance at the Fundación Juan March in Madrid on January 8, 2025, a featured event in the Earning a Living concert series. François Couperin’s keyboard compositions illuminate the role of royal patronage as the modus vivendi for musicians of the Early Modern period. Couperin’s treatise, L’Art de Toucher le Clavecin, is here interwoven with a selection of his Pièces de clavecin, giving rise to a portrait gallery in music, each inspired by anonymous figures who inhabited the French court. This set of pièces de caractère, whose allusive and encoded meanings remain largely enigmatic today, is presented in groupings by tonality, each offering a window into the refined world of Baroque palace life and its intricate web of connections.