New Couperin CD now available

© Tilman Skowroneck November 2021

My new CD with selections from François Couperin’s second and third Ordres and the complete eighth Ordre (including three preludes in suitable keys from L’Art de Toucher le Clavecin) is now available at the label TYXArt. It can be bought via the usual online sellers such as Amazon, etc. See also this post for pictures and sound samples.

The recording was made in Ödenäs church on March 4 and 5, 2020, by Erik Sikkema. The Harpsichord is an 18th-century French model (5 octaves) by Martin Skowroneck (1980). For people interested in these things, the same harpsichord can also be heard in Gustav Leonhardt’s 1981 recording of harpsichord works by C.-B. Balbastre and A.-L- Couperin and on my own recording of the suites in E, D and A by J.-Ph. Rameau (Emergo Classics 2001, EC3921-2, also recorded by Erik Sikkema).

Here is a link to the magnificent B-minor Passacaille from the 8th Ordre from the (rather compressed-sounding) auto-generated Youtube playlist.

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travel report

Although I have been reading a book about writing, I am now having a hard time getting started on this post. Why did I read a book about writing? Because I was traveling and had to fill some event-less periods of time: on the boat between Göteborg and Kiel, in numerous trains and before and during recording sessions. Some other activities besides traveling and recording required a kind of private brand of mindfulness instead of reading and will not be mentioned here.

One of the tasks I had in Bremen, first stop, was to finalize the voicing and regulation of Martin Skowroneck’s No. 89, a five-octave French 2manual harpsichord.