De la grotte de Grumpy… à Versailles

Fastes et divertissements de Versailles
Volume V: l’instrument soliste
Louis Marchand, Louis-Nicolas Clérambault
Pièces de clavecin
Marcelle Charbonnier (harpsichord)
rec. March 1955, Paris
Philips L1L 0011

Yes, I’ve been grumpier than usual. I’m grumpy pretty much all day, every day. What with the mess in the Cave, the hoohah about internet file-sharing, the crass criminality of some sharers, the bullying obstructionism of some record companies who seem hell-bent on scuppering this wonderful distribution channel, the poisonous pettiness of certain posters on RMCR, the sudden surge of cowboy sellers (I’ve recently bought several shamefully mis-described second-hand CDs), I’m just GRUMPY!

And I’m barely progressing with my work.

Never mind, here’s a lovely divertissement from what I should be doing. This LP contains all the published harpsichord music of these composers. (A big manuscript with more Marchand has since turned up.) It’s the last in a lovely series of luxuriously presented gatefold albums surveying the pomp and pleasures of Versailles, issued ‘under the patronage of the Secretariat of State for Arts and Letters’. Isn’t the cover handsome, illegible colour scheme and all? I just found this very good copy; now I’m missing only Vol.IV, ‘La musique et l’Eglise’.

Vol.I, ‘La musique et les salons’, with a violin concerto by Leclair and sonatas by Francoeur and Blavet, played by Charles Cyroulnik with Charbonnier and Maurice Hewitt and his Chamber Orchestra, has been transferred to CD by the excellent French label Forgotten Records. Otherwise I’d have done it. You can never have too much of all of these three composers.

Unfortunately, I know nothing about Marcelle Charbonnier, except that I like her playing very much. In her hands, the Chacone [sic] of Marchand’s first book is especially majestic and moving. Please feel free to point me to a biography or obituary. And to tell me what she was playing on – the LP doesn’t say but, again, I like it. I’ve no idea why the first book was mastered louder than the second; I’ve left the relative levels as they were.

Here are the LP’s title listings and English sleeve notes:

LOUIS MARCHAND 1669-1732

PIÈCES POUR CLAVECIN
LIVRE PREMIER (1702)
Prélude • Allemande • Premiere Courante • Deuxième Courante • Sarabande • Gigue • Chacone • Gavotte en rondeau • Menuet

LIVRE SECOND (1703)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Sarabande • Gigue • Gavotte • Menuet • Menuet en rondeau

‘The most illustrious keyboard virtuoso of his day, Louis Marchand was born in Lyons, France in 1669. At the age of fourteen, he was already a more accomplished musician than his father, a famous organist in Lyons. After working in Nevers and Auxerre, he came to Paris in 1689 and was appointed organist at the College des Jésuites (now the Lycée Louis-le-Grand) on the Rue Saint-Jacques. His reputation was so great that he was asked to become the organist at three others [sic, bless] churches. Finally, in 1706 he was called to the Royal Chapel at Versailles.

‘In 1714, after some unpleasantness with his wife, who had his salary confiscated [so unlike Madame Grumpy!], he left France for a concert-tour in Germany. He met Bach in Dresden, but did not dare compete with him. Bach, however, esteemed Marchand highly and made copies of some of his works.

‘He returned to Paris in 1716 and became organist at the Chapelle des Cordeliers. He remained at this post until his death in 1732 although he never accepted pay for his work there, living entirely on the proceeds of his concerts and his teaching activities.

‘In 1702 and 1703 he had published his harpsichord pieces, which show some influence of Chambonnières. They are brilliantly and elegantly written, but perhaps Marchand used them merely as frameworks for his remarkable improvisations.’

(Each book consists of a single suite; the LP’s German text says the first is in D, the second in C. Modern reference works seem to date them both to 1702.)

LOUIS-NICOLAS CLÉRAMBAULT
1679-1749

PIÈCES POUR CLAVECIN
SUITE EN UT MAJEUR (1704)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Première sarabande •
Deuxième sarabande • Gavotte • Gigue • Premier menuet• Deuxième menuet

SUITE EN UT MINEUR (1710?)
Prélude • Allemande • Courante • Sarabande • Gigue

“The famous Clérambault found melodies and expressions which were completely new and which cause him to be considered the one, true model.” Thus one of Clérambault's contemporaries judged this composer, while another made these comments: “Clérambault's health was not strong, but he was lively and playful in character. His talent was not obscured by caprice. He was a good father, a good husband, a good friend.”

‘Clérambault, whose father was one of the King's Twenty-Four Violins, had an early start in music. He was made organist first at Saint Jacques in Paris and, later, simultaneously at Saint-Louis de Saint-Cyr and Saint-Sulpice, as well “Surintendant” for Madame de Maintenon.

‘Besides a book of pieces for harpsichord, he left one for organ, some French cantatas, and some sonatas which show the influence of Corelli, whose music was so fashionable in the last decades of the seventeenth century.

‘The two Harpsichord Suites recorded here are subtly charming and show the great mastery attained by their composer. The Preludes are still in the style of notation used by Louis Couperin (that is, the[re] are no definite time-values assigned to the notes). It is interesting that in those pieces showing the most advanced stylization of the original dance-forms, Clérambault made frequent use of odd-numbered, unsymmetrical periods, as for example in the two Allemandes, the Courantes, and the Gigue of the Second Suite.’

(Again, modern sources date Clérambault’s Premier livre de pièces de clavecin to 1704 – no idea why Philips put 1710, which is the date of his Livre d’orgue. You can download the original 1704 edition from IMSLP. The second suite is oddly laid out.)

Each Suite is a single, fully-tagged mono FLAC file. All four are wrapped up in a single .rar archive, which you can download here.

I’ve also been grumpy because I bought some interesting old baroque LPs from a dealer in the US, some of which turned out to be fake stereo and others to be too dirty even for Grumpy, so I won’t foist them on you. I’m on the hunt for the mono originals. But there is other good stuff lying around here, which I hope to share with you (I even know where it is, since I had a bit of a tidy).

This is partly for a harpsichordist friend. No idea if he’ll like it.

It's not about fur coats, you know

There's more rubbish talked about 'classical' music than almost anything else I know of - I hear and read it every day, which is why I'm in an almost perpetual grump. Then I get cheered up by people like my hero Damian, who told me recently that he has an old LP of Palestrina's Missa Papae Marcelli in the pipeline. Sent me shuffling off to dig out this one, which has been mouldering in the wine boxes (great for storing LPs, in the somewhat cluttered Grumpcave):

Palestrina Missa Papae Marcelli a 6 vv
rec. 3 July 1952
Missa brevis a 4 vv, Missa ad fugam a 4 vv (excerpts)
rec. 17 February 1955
Netherlands Chamber Choir, Felix de Nobel
Philips Réalités C.3

One of the things that people don't get about classical music is, precisely, that it's 'classical' - a long, continuous, self-referential tradition, typified by and crystallised around exemplary, 'classical' genres, styles, works, idioms and gestures, a tradition on which composers comment in the very act of adding to and extending it. So trying to find another name for it or pretending that crooning musicals is part of that tradition, is to misunderstand it (innocent) or traduce it (guilty). I'm also not in favour of encouraging people to talk while it's going on. You can do that at home.

Unfortunately, another misconception (apart from the fur coat one), which has been abetted by musicology's obsession with dots and dashes, politics and gender, is that performers play little or no part in this tradition or its development; thankfully, that's slowly changing - but it's not going to change any faster if dog-in-the-mangerish copyright laws and corporate ignorance mean we can't hear more than a handful of old performances.

If anyone's 'classical', of course, it has always been Palestrina. But I bet no choir or conductor today would think they have anything to learn from this lovely LP, which I am proud to own in a limited, numbered (oops - a fur-coat moment! Darn, rumbled) gatefold sleeve with lovely notes and illustrations, which my scanner can't cope with - clock the mess it made of the cover. I wish I had the Dutch Masters CD of the Netherlands Chamber Choir but, in their wisdom, Philips pre-decided I wouldn't want it - and who am I to argue? The gods of marketing, we are told, are always right.

This record was also issued in Britain on Philips NBL 5033, which was well received by Alec Robertson in the May 1956 issue of The Gramophone. Bits of it were also coupled with other things, which Grumpy would love to hear.

On side 1, the Missa Papae Marcelli sounded good on the turntable but, oddly, slightly worse after declicking and monoing - perhaps the clean-up made the rumble, traffic and air-con more audible. The 7 fully-tagged mono FLACS are in a .rar file here.

I was more worried about the quality of side 2, which is quite full (even though they've omitted the Credo and Benedictus of the Missa ad fugam, about which I can find nothing online). It sounded congested towards the end - and I slightly crashed the zero barrier at one peak - but I feel it's emerged from the wash smelling slightly sweeter. I decided not to chop these masses into movements, so 2 fully-tagged mono FLACS are in a .rar file here.

More goodies soon, if I can find them under the bat guano...

ADDENDUM
I just found the recording dates amongst Mike Gray's data on CHARM, which I couldn't access last weekend. Sorry, you'll have to correct the 'date' and 'comment' tags. Explains why the Missa Papae Marcelli sounds quite different from the others - it was recorded 2½ years earlier.