Luogo e data di registrazione		6 Rue de Solférino, Paris (Francia) - 6-9 dicembre 1977
	Registrazione: live / studio		studio
	Producer / Engineer		Gerd Berg / Johann-Nikolaus Matthes
	Prima Edizione LP		EMI Electrola "Reflexe" - 1C 065-30 945 - (1 lp) - durata 51' 47" - (p) 1978 - Analogico
	Prima Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - CDM 7 63425 2 - (1 cd) - durata 51' 47" - (c) 1990 - ADD
	Edizione CD		EMI "Classics" - 8 26514 2 - (1 cd) - durata 51' 47" - (c) 2000 - ADD
	Note		-

FRENCH HARPSICHOR MUSIC Those for whom seventeenth-century music says something distinctive and necessary have long been familiar with the voice of Louis Couperin. His preludes, dance movements and occasional pieces belong to that special store of keyboard music that succeeds well before an audience, but gives even greater pleasure to the player in private. Couperin’s life is adequately charted, and there have been three modern editions of his work; all in all, he stands in the public domain. The same does not hold good for Jean Nicolas Geoffroy, a name that will be completely unknown to most listeners, although his music is as original, passionate and uncompromising as that of Louis Couperin, sometimes perhaps even more so. Organist of the Paris church of St. Nicolas-du-Chardonnet, Geoffroy moved in 1690 to Perpignan, near the Spanish Mediterranean border, where he held the post of cathedral organist until his death four years later. His work - or some of it, at least - is preserved in a rather mysterious small manuscript in the Paris Bibliotheque Nationale. No modern edition exists as yet. This seems to be the first recording of any of Geoffroy’s harpsichord music, certainly the first to be played on a French seventeenth-century instrument. Apart from the facts given above we know very little about Geoffroy’s life. We are not even sure which of several musicians called Geoffroy the composer was: the name was a common one in Paris at the end of the seventeenth century. Martine Roche, the only person to have made a detailed survey* of Bibliothèque Nationale Rés. 475, has researched the question with great thoroughness but found no satisfactory answer, just as she has been unable to establish the date of the manuscript or the identity of the copyist. The volume is certainly not autograph, since it is described as follows in a note inside the front cover: “Livre des pieces de clavessin de tous les Tons Naturels et transposéz, de Jean Nicolas Geoffroy Organiste de St. Nicolas du Chardonnet a Paris et depuis Organiste de la cathedralle St. Jean de Perpignan En Catalogne ou Il est mort". Martine Roche dates the manuscript between the publications of D`Anglebert (1689) and Le Roux (1705), but this is surely too late; between 1665 and 1680 seems more likely. No music by Geoffroy is included in the important Bauyn MS (about 1660), the main source for Louis Couperin. The 255 pieces of Rés. 475 comprise 14 suites, arranged by key stepwise from C minor to B minor, four immense chaconnes, some separate descriptive pieces and two dialogues for organ and three viols. There are no preludes. Four of the suites, in the remoter keys of E major, F minor, A major and B minor, reappear in F major, G minor, G major and A minor, with modifications and enrichments, showing that the meantone tuning so hotly defended by Jean Denis in his Traité de l'accord de l’éspinette of 1643 may have suited the public better than it did the composers. Certainly Louis Couperin wrote in some of the "difficult" keys that Geoffroy uses and added one more - F sharp minor - that definitely must be differently tempered to be endurable. However, Geoffroy (or whoever did the transcriptions) offers C minor, with its prominent A flat, without change or comment. One curious feature of Rés. 475 is that 122 pieces, none of them recorded here, are written throughout in two parts, an economy that shows Geoffroy’s angular harmonic thinking to good advantage. A final puzzle is the note “Tirée des pieces de son Opera de clavessin” attached to some of the numbers; it seems to imply that the manuscript is merely a selection from some larger printed source, although no such publication has yet been traced. The words “a la maitrise de R..." (a now illegible name of five letters) can just be made out inside the cover. Did Rés. 475 one belong to the cathedral library of some such place as Rouen or Reims? A companion volume having the same provenance, Rés. 476, an anonymous collection of seventeenth-century French organ music, has been published under the name of Geoffroy in a modern edition on the strength of a common background to the two books, but the identification is not supported either by handwriting or by musical style. In Geoffroy‘s suites, the traditional movements of allemande, courante and sarabande occur in that order, with the smaller two-voice dances (gavottes, menuets, rondeaux etc.) inserted between sarabande and gigue. A chaconne or passacaille nearly always seems to close the work, but the manuscript is so crowded, spacesaving and full of directs that we cannot always be sure of the author’s intentions - or even of the copyist’s. A notational oddity of the F minor suite is the key-signature of two flats - B flat and A flat! All D‘s and E’s are assumed natural, unless specifically flattened before the note, but the rule is so cavalierly applied that the alternative G minor version proves a godsend, especially in the nearly unbelievable (but doubly verifiable) final couplet of the chaconne. From the first few bars of this F minor suite we are confronted by music of an arresting personality: a melodic rise and fall of great gravity and poise, underscored by tense, athletic harmonies, a fondness for contrary motion, false relations and for sharp dissonances of the seventh and ninth,wide chordal spacing, egocentric middle voices that recall Purcell’s viola lines, obsessive rhythmic patterns throughout a whole movement (the first allemande and the gigue from the C minor suite, for instance) and, most striking of all, the ability to compress a world of meaning into half a reprise, even into half a bar. Both the sarabandes are memorable, as is the unobtrusive skill with which Geoffroy builds the entire F minor gigue on a three-bar unit, but the composer’s greatest achievement is probably the second C minor allemande. The eloquence of the upper voice and the chromatic intensity of the harmonies, sometimes sounded together, sometimes broken in stile luthé, set this lament on the same level as the more famous tributes of the French lutenists and violistes, and of Froberger, Louis Couperin and D’Anglebert among the harpsichordists. Was it perhaps indeed intended for the unhappy lutenist, Blancrocher, whose drunken fall downstairs was commemorated by both Froberger and Couperin? A point in common with the other two tombeaux is the peal of bells heard briefly in the second half and actually marked “Carillon” in Geoffroy’s allemande. Neither Geoffroy's music nor Louis Couperin’s remotely resembles the delicate art of Chambonnières, the author of the first published books of harpsichord music in France (1670) and Couperin’s teacher (or at least patron) in Paris from the early 1650's onwards. Possibly Chambonnières’ influence on Couperin was more social than musical, for a contemporary wrote that the two men were like “deux chefs de secte”, both excelling in their art, but in character totally dissimilar: one was said to touch the ear, the other the heart. Le Gallois’ judgment is perhaps a little unjust to Chambonnières, whose restraint and subtlety can often be very moving, but undoubtedly Louis Couperin’s serene sensuality appeals very immediately to modern ears. The second F major chaconne is marked “de Monsieur Chambonnières" in the Bauyn MS, but only an excessive reliance on eye rather than ear could perpetuate the attribution: melodic contour, harmonic richness and tessitura all suggest Couperin as the author. The two most enigmatic pieces in this arbitrarily chosen ‘suite’ are the ones that most nearly approach extempore improvisation: the lament for Blancrocher and the unmeasured prelude. Louis Couperin’s gently-tolling F, G, F, G seems a kinder farewell than Froberger’s lugubrious descending scale (or than Geoffroy’s exuberant outburst, if that indeed records the same occasion); maybe we can detect affection in this music as well as piety. The prelude,too, has a connection with the Parisian luteworld. Before a concert lutenists used to announce the key of the following pieces, warm up their fingers and test the tuning of their strings by playing a short, rhythmically free introduction. In adopting this practice, the clavecinistes had the idea of using whole-note notation without bar-lines to suggest the indefinite duration of lute sound, but they linked the harmonic progressions together with a maze of sweeping lines and curves. Couperin, characteristically, breaks into a little Italianate jig, written out quite precisely, before sinking to rest on a slightly sanctimonious plagal cadence. Colin Tilney, 1978 * Martine Roche: Un livre de clavecin de la fin du XVIIe siécle (Recherches sur la musique française classique, VII, 1967)
EMI Electrola "Reflexe"