Couperin: Keyboard Music, Vol. 3

CASE MEMORIAL LIBRARY CALL NUMBER: CD/CLASSICAL/Couperin
PERFORMER: Angela Hewitt
James R. Oestreich wrote in the New York Times: "The pianist Angela Hewitt, like her Canadian compatriot Glenn Gould, has devoted much of her career to Bach, usually with excellent results. But in recent years, Ms. Hewitt has also established a sideline specialty in the keyboard works of François Couperin, generally given a wider berth by pianists. Here she completes a three-CD survey of those works in typically fine style. . . . [S]he has taken care to choose the pieces 'which I think are the most interesting and the most suitable to performance on the modern piano.' The main difficulty for pianists in Couperin is an effusion of embellishments, much easier to toss off without overemphasis, let alone clunkiness, on the harpsichord. Ms. Hewitt's handling of all those fleeting lilts and curlicues is a model of lightness and elegance. . . . Ms. Hewitt plays the 13th Order complete, and thus 'Les Folies Françoises, ou Les Dominos,' a wonderful series of miniportraits of figures at a masked ball. As with the disk as a whole, one item proves more delicious than the last."